Last semester, speculative designer James King worked with myself and a small group of science and public health students at the University of Michigan to explore how a fusion of science and creative art can lead to new insights and modes of communication.  The exercise was part of the A World of Surprises project – a project James is working on as the Witt Artist in residence at the UM School of Art and Design.

Part of the aim was to take these science-grounded students out of their comfort zone, expose them to some radical new ideas and perspectives, and see what happens.

The results were impressive!  Once the students realized that they weren’t bound by the rigid limitations of their science education, they became enthused over using creative techniques to tell science-grounded stories that connected with people on a far deeper level than just the facts would allow.

Today the group presented the fruits of their final assignment: to produce a piece of creative work that captures the tension – in narrative form – between imagined catastrophic risks and experienced mundane risks. As a group, we were interested in the tension between the catastrophic consequences often imagined to arise from human endeavors, and the mundane reality that often develops.

I’ll try to showcase all of the projects over the next few weeks.  They were all, in their own way, quite brilliant.  Coming up in future posts there will be:

• The Tale of Rhino Banana (a brilliant story of a technological breakthrough that runs up against public resistance);
• Salutary lessons from the struggle between evil and the divine in the middle ages;
• A visual juxtaposition of comparative risks related to Fukushima; and
• A new-future story of technological sophistication and mundane consequences.

(I’ll add the links as they are posted – The Tale of Rhino Banana will be up first)

James will be back in Ann Arbor for the culmination of the A World Of Surprises project in March – stay tuned on that.

]]> http://2020science.org/2012/02/04/exploring-speculated-catastrophe-and-mundane-reality/feed/ 1 http://2020science.org/2011/06/04/responsible-development-of-unobtanium/ http://2020science.org/2011/06/04/responsible-development-of-unobtanium/#comments Sat, 04 Jun 2011 14:56:58 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=4235

I thought I’d post this spoof presentation for the fun of it on the responsible development of “unobtainium”, which seems to have some remarkable similarities with some other emerging technologies:

Friends of the Earth have just released a new report challenging claims that nanotechnology will lead to greener, more energy-efficient technologies, lower-impact technologies.

I’ve only had the chance to skim through the report so far, and so don’t have detailed comments on it.  But on my initial skim a number of things struck me:

• The report is written from a specific perspective that questions the validity of claims made of nanotechnology – especially that it will “deliver energy technologies that are efficient, inexpensive and environmentally sound”
• It is pretty comprehensive, covering nanotechnology and solar energy, wind energy, hydrogen energy, oil and gas extraction, batteries, supercapacitors, nanocoatings and insulators, catalysis and reinforced parts for airplanes and cars.
• However, it doesn’t cover all nano-applications in the energy sector.  Two examples are the use of heterogeneous catalysts in vehicle exhausts and to reduce the energy overheads of a multitude of processes, the use of nanomaterials to develop more efficient power lines.
• The report also tends to focus on areas where it is easier to construct position statements challenging statements on the positive use of nanomaterials.
• Nevertheless, it appears to be a significant and well-written counterbalance to publications that promote the benefits of nanotechnology in the energy sector without deep and critical evaluation of the pros and cons of the technology.

Are the issues raised valid and in need of further exploration?  It’s worth reading for yourself to decide.  I’ve included the executive summary below – the full report (88 pages) is available here. Agree or disagree?  Feel free to comment below!

In a world increasingly concerned about climate change, resource depletion, pollution and water shortages, nanotechnology has been much heralded as a new environmental saviour. Proponents have claimed that nanotechnology will deliver energy technologies that are efficient, inexpensive and environmentally sound. They predict that highly precise nanoman- ufacturing and the use of smaller quantities of potent nanomaterials will break the tie between economic activity and resource use. In short, it is argued that nanotechnology will enable ongoing economic growth and the expansion of consumer culture at a vastly reduced environmental cost.

In this report, for the first time, Friends of the Earth puts the ‘green’ claims of industry under the microscope. Our investigation reveals that the nanotechnology industry has over-promised and under-delivered. Many of the claims made regarding nanotechnology’s environmental performance, and breakthroughs touted by companies claiming to be near market, are not matched by reality. Worse, the energy and environmental costs of the growing nano industry are far higher than expected.

We also reveal that despite their green rhetoric, governments in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Japan and Saudi Arabia are using public funds to develop nanotechnology to find and extract more oil and gas. The world’s biggest petrochemical companies, including Halliburton, Shell, BP America, Exxon Mobil and Petrobras have established a joint consortium to fund research to increase oil extraction.

The performance of nano-based renewables has been considerably less than predicted. Efficiency of solar energy conversion by nano solar panels is still about 10 percent behind that achieved by silicon panels. The technical challenges of bringing renewable energy laboratory achievements to market have been prohibitive in many instances. The United States President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology states that in 2009 only one percent of global nanotechnology-based products came from the energy and environmental sector.
The energy demands and environmental impacts of manufacturing nanomaterials are unexpectedly high. Manufacturing carbon nanofibers requires 13 to 50 times the energy required to manufacture smelting aluminium, and 95-360 times the energy to make steel, on an equal mass basis. A team of United States researchers has concluded that single walled carbon nanotubes may be “one of the most energy intensive materials known to humankind”.

Due to the large energy demands of manufacturing nanomaterials, even some nano applications in the energy saving sector will come at a net energy cost. For example even though strengthening windmill blades with carbon nanofibers would make the blades lighter, because of the energy required to manufacture the nanoblades, early life cycle analysis shows that it could be more energy efficient to use conventional windmill blades.

Much-touted nano developments in the hydrogen sector are at a very early stage. It is improbable that cars powered by renewable energy generated hydrogen will be on the roads in the next ten or twenty years – the period in which emissions cuts are critical. In the meantime, development of hydrogen cars entrenches reliance on fossil fuels to produce the hydrogen.

Most nanoproducts are not designed for the energy sector and will come at a net energy cost. Super strong nano golf clubs, wrinkle disguising nanocosmetics, and colour-enhanced television screens take a large quantity of energy to produce, while offering no environmental savings. Such nanoproducts greatly outnumber applications in which nano could deliver net energy savings.

The environmental demands of nanomanufacturing are higher than that of conventional materials. Nanomanufacturing is characterised by very high use of water and solvents. Large quantities of hazardous substances are used or generated as byproducts. Only one tenth of one percent of materials used to manufacture nanoproducts found in computers and electronic goods are contained in the final products. That is, 99.9 percent of materials used in manufacturing become waste products.

Despite the serious uncertainties, there is a growing body of research demonstrating that some nanomaterials used in energy generation, storage and efficiency applications can pose health and environmental risks. Carbon nanotubes are touted for use in electronics, energy applications, and specialty car and plane parts. However, early research shows that some forms of nanotubes can cause mesothelioma, the deadly cancer associated with asbestos exposure.

The release of nanomaterials to the environment could also result in accelerated generation of potent greenhouse gas emissions. Antibacterial nano silver is used widely in clothing, textiles, cleaning products, personal care products and surface coatings. Yet preliminary study shows that when nano silver is exposed to sludge, similar to that found in typical waste water treatment plants, four times the typical level of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide is released

Nanotechnology is not an unqualified environmental saviour nor will its widespread use in everything from socks to face creams enable us to pursue ‘business as usual’ while substantively reducing our environmental footprint. At best, such claims can be interpreted as the result of wishful thinking on the part of proponents; at worst they can be seen as misleading greenwash.

Nanotechnology is a powerful technology that has the potential to deliver novel approaches to the methods by which we harness, use, and store energy. Nevertheless, Friends of the Earth warns that overall, this technology will come at a huge energy and broader environmental cost. Nanotechnology may ultimately facilitate the next wave of expansion of the global economy, deepening our reliance on fossil fuels and existing hazardous chemicals, while introducing a new generation of hazards. Further, it may transform and integrate ever-more parts of nature into our systems of production and consumption.

Update 11/17/10:  Replaced local report links with link to FOE report web-page

Back in the mists of time, I was approached with a crazy proposition – would I help co-edit a book on nanotechnologies regulation!  In a moment of weakness I said yes, and a little more than two and a half years later, the book is finally about to hit the shelves.

I actually think the resulting International Handbook on Regulating Nanotechnologies rather a useful, coherent and engaging collection of chapters – my co-editors Di Bowman and Graeme Hodge did a wonderful job encouraging a bunch of top thinkers in the field to write under occasionally whimsical but always relevant titles.

To whet your appetite prior to the book’s release sometime in November, here’s a sneak peak at the contents:

PART I:    Concepts and Foundations

1.    Introduction: the regulatory challenges for nanotechnologies

Graeme A. Hodge, Diana M. Bowman and Andrew D. Maynard

2.    Philosophy of technoscience in the regime of vigilance

Alfred Nordmann

3.    Tracing and disputing the story of nanotechnology

Chris Toumey

4.    The age of regulatory governance and nanotechnologies

Roger Brownsword

PART II:    Frameworks for Regulating Nanotechnologies

5.    Nanotechnology captured

John Miles

6.    The scientific basis for regulating nanotechnologies

David Williams

7.    The current risk assessment paradigm in relation to the regulation of nanotechnologies

Qasim Chaudhry, Hans Bouwmeester and Rolf F. Hertel

8.    Regulating risk: the bigger picture

Karinne Ludlow and Peter Binks

9.    Producing safety or managing risks? How regulatory paradigms affect insurability

Thomas K. Epprecht

PART III:    Case Studies in Regulating Nanotechnologies and Nano-Products

10.    The evolving nanotechnology environmental, health, and safety landscape: A business perspective

Oliver Tassinari, Jurron Bradley and Michael Holman

11.    Regulation of carbon nanotubes and other high aspect ratio nanoparticles: approaching this challenge from the perspective of asbestos

Robert J. Aitken, Sheona Peters, Alan D Jones and Vicki Stone

12.    Approaching the nanoregulation problem in chemicals legislation in the EU and US

Markus Widmer and Christoph Meili

13.    A good foundation? Regulatory oversight of nanotechnologies using cosmetics as a case study

Geert van Calster and Diana M. Bowman

14.    Therapeutic products: regulating drugs and medical devices

Rogério Sá Gaspar

15.    Regulatory perspectives on nanotechnologies in foods and food contact materials

Anna Gergely, Qasim Chaudhry and Diana M. Bowman

16.    Regulation of nanoscale materials under media-specific environmental laws

Linda Breggin and John Pendergrass

17.    Military applications: special conditions for regulation

Jürgen Altmann

18.    Regulating nanotechnology through intellectual property rights

Gregory N. Mandel

PART IV:    The Future Regulatory Landscape

19.    The role of NGOs in governing nanotechnologies: challenging the ‘benefits versus risks’ framing of nanotech innovation

Georgia Miller and Gyorgy Scrinis

20.    Voluntary measures in nanotechnology risk governance: the difficulty of holding the wolf by the ears

Christoph Meili and Markus Widmer

21.    The role of risk management frameworks and certification bodies

Thorsten Weidl, Gerhard Klein and Rolf Zöllner

22.    Risk governance in the field of nanotechnologies: core challenges of an integrative approach

Ortwin Renn and Antje Grobe

23.    International coordination and cooperation: the next agenda in nanomaterials regulation

Robert Falkner, Linda Breggin, Nico Jaspers, John Pendergrass and Read Porter

24.    Transnational regulation of nanotechnology: reality or romanticism?

Kenneth W. Abbott, Douglas J. Sylvester and Gary E. Marchant

25.    From novel materials to next generation nanotechnology: a new approach to regulating the products of nanotechnology

J. Clarence Davies

PART V:    Conclusion

26.    Conclusions: triggers, gaps, risks and trust

Andrew D. Maynard, Diana M. Bowman and Graeme A. Hodge

More information on the International Handbook on Regulating Technologies can be found here.  The anticipated publication date is late November.

Complete the following:

Setting:

A well known and sometimes off-beat technology commentator explores new breakthroughs on a popular TV science and tech show.

Story:

1. Spiders’ silk is incredibly strong, but in short supply (ever tried harvesting silk from a spider?).
2. So why not take the gene responsible for making spider silk, and splice it into a goat?
3. The result: goats that produce milk laced with spider silk-protein.
4. All you have to do then is extract the protein from the milk and spin it into silk and hey presto – a plentiful supply of a super-strong, incredibly versatile, “natural” material.

How should the story end?

Take Our Poll

There’s a serious point to this question, which I’ll come back to later.  For now though, I’m intrigued as to how people think the story should conclude – remembering this is a TV show for a broad audience.

The spider/goat stuff is real btw – check out this snippet from the US National Science Foundation.

[Update 11/2/10 - the follow-up blog to this piece has just been posted]

The immediate lessons from the Deepwater Horizon disaster are pretty obvious – we (or at least somebody) messed up!  But what about the less-obvious lessons – especially those concerning technology innovation and how it’s handled?  The Fall 2010 issue of Findings – the University of Michigan School of Public Health Alumni magazine – contains a short piece addressing just this question.  As is increasingly becoming my habit, here’s an earlier draft of that article.  As well as providing a little more information that the published piece does, it allows an interesting comparison between a good draft (what I think works) and an expertly edited final article (what the editor thinks will work).  As usual, I was more than impressed by how a good editor can sharpen a piece up.

In today’s increasingly crowded, interconnected and resource-constrained world, we are more dependent on technology innovation than at any previous time in human history.  By 2050, over nine billion people will be placing unprecedented demands on the earth’s resources – a demand that will only be met through developing and using new technologies.

Yet technology innovation comes with its own challenges.  The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico provides a sobering reminder of what can go wrong when we trust in technology without investing sufficiently in the future.  Devastating as this disaster has been though, it is only one small example of the challenges we will face as a global society as resources become scarcer, demands become greater, and our technological reach threatens to exceed our ability to handle it safely.

If a sustainable future is to be built on the effective development and use of technology innovation, we need to rethink how we reap the benefits of technology.  The full impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill will take years to evaluate.  But underlying the immediate impacts of the disaster is a story of how technology innovation failed, and the lessons that can be learned from this failure; not just so human and environmental disasters of this magnitude can be avoided in the future, but also so that we begin understand more fully how to develop and use new technologies more responsibly.

The technology being used on the Deepwater Horizon rig was at the cutting edge of innovation.  Drilling at depths of 5000 feet below the surface of the sea – far beyond the reach of direct human intervention – the operation was pushing the bounds of the possible.  Until the disaster, this was a story of technology innovation allowing us to tap previously inaccessible oil reserves.  But there is a less obvious story here – one of emerging technologies that could have been used to mitigate the impacts of the spill, if only there had been sufficient forethought and investment to develop them to the point of usability before they were needed.

As it is, the use of advanced technologies associated with the Deepwater Horizon rig failed on three counts:  The potential consequences of using an unproven technology were not explored sufficiently; there was inadequate investment in understanding, avoiding and mitigating risks upstream; and there was a lack of foresight in developing new technologies to manage the consequences of failure.  Greater foresight, investment and upstream action on each of these three counts could have helped avoid or reduce the impact of the ensuing disaster.

Given the uncertainty surrounding the drilling technology being used and the potentially severe consequences of errors, more realistic scenario planning would have helped prepare for low probability but high impact risks.  Coupled to this, more strategic research into the potential risks associated with deepwater drilling, together with greater stakeholder engagement, could have helped industry, regulators and others more effectively manage the consequences of the disaster.  And more proactive up-front investment in remediation technologies could have provided more effective tools for managing the consequences of the disaster.

This last issue sticks out like a sore thumb.  In the face of increasing global challenges, it is all too easy to latch onto the naïve assumption that technology-based solutions will present themselves as and when needed:  The belief that technology innovation will save the day is a pervasive one.  Yet as oil began gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, potential new technology-based solutions to managing the spill were conspicuous by their absence – not because the science wasn’t there, but because there had been insufficient investment in developing it into commercially viable technologies.  Technology platforms such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology for instance have the potential to support oil cleanup solutions that are significantly more effective and environmentally benign than existing ones.  But in the absence of concerted efforts to translate cutting edge science into viable commercial products, BP ended up using an established dispersant with questionable environmental and human health impacts, and uncertain consequences when introduced to an oil plume 5000 feet below the sea’s surface.

If we are to benefit from emerging technologies – to ensure that they help address pressing challenges, and do not create more problems than they solve – we clearly need to think differently about how they are developed and used.  There needs to be far greater awareness of the consequences of getting complex and far-reaching technologies wrong, a new willingness for stakeholders to work together to find sustainable solutions, and new thinking on how potential risks can be identified and addressed as early as possible in the development cycle.  Because as emerging technologies become increasingly complex and powerful, the consequences of mis-steps on public health and the environment will only become more catastrophic.

This will require better understanding of how emerging technologies can lead to unexpected impacts on human health.  And it will depend on developing a deeper appreciation of how technology innovation can be nudged along more responsible – and ultimately more sustainable and beneficial – pathways.  In effect, we need a new paradigm that places a science-based understanding of risk at the center of sustainable development.

The Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan is at the forefront of this movement toward a new risk paradigm.  By integrating cutting edge science, multi-stakeholder partnerships and effective communication, the Center is working towards avoiding harm from emerging technologies while ensuring their benefits are fully realized.  It’s an approach that will significantly reduce the chances of future adverse health impacts – but it’s also one that makes sound business sense.

Devastating as the Deepwater Horizon disaster has been, it is a timely wakeup call to the consequences getting technology innovation wrong – one that has relevance far beyond the confines of BP.  As we enter an age where we are more dependent than ever on getting technology innovation right, corporations, policy makers, policy influencers and citizens all need to be a part of a process that supports the emergence of responsible technologies.  But for this process to lead to a sustainable future, it must be built on the best possible information if it is to succeed – which means investing proactively and strategically in the science of identifying, understanding and avoiding potential risks.  The alternative is to take increasingly risky gambles with our technology-supported future.  And as any seasoned gambler knows, the house always wins – eventually.

The version of this piece published in Findings can be accessed here.

New technologies depend on uncommon materials, and society depends on new technologies.  Which means that economies that develop the former and control the latter have something of an upper hand in today’s interconnected and technology-dependent world.

This has clearly not escaped the notice of the Chinese.  China, which controls around 90% of the world’s rare earth minerals – many of which are essential to advanced materials – has being blocking shipments of these materials to Japan for the last month. And now, according to yesterday’s New York Times, it has “quietly halted some shipments of those materials to the United States and Europe”.

At the same time, according to the journal Nature,

“Alternative energy, biotechnology, advanced materials and fuel-efficient vehicles will be promoted in China’s newly mapped 2011–15 development plan, according to a report published by the country’s state council on 18 October.”

In other words, China is simultaneously controlling the flow of materials that are essential to many new technologies, while actively working on the very technologies that exploit these materials.

Rare earth elements aren’t that rare, despite the name.  But in recent years, it has become increasingly unprofitable for economies outside China to mine and process them.  As Technology Review noted a few days ago:

“Rare earths are comprised of 17 elements, such as terbium, which is used to make green phosphors for flat-panel TVs, lasers, and high-efficiency fluorescent lamps. Neodymium is key to the permanent magnets used to make high-efficiency electric motors. Although well over 90 percent of the minerals are produced in China, they are found in many places around the world, and, in spite of their name, are actually abundant in the earth’s crust (the name is a hold-over from a 19^th-century convention). In recent years, low-cost Chinese production and environmental concerns have caused suppliers outside of China to shut down operations.”

One solution to the looming monopoly is to begin extraction processes elsewhere.  Another is to look for alternatives to these increasingly valuable resources.  As Tim Harper of Cientifica noted in a recent report:

“Through the use of nanotechnologies we can now start to develop processes that do not use rare resources, for example using carbon nanotubes and metallic nanoparticles in polymers to make them conducting rather than applying thin layers of indium tin oxide.”

There are difficulties to this approach, as Dexter Johnson at IEEE Spectrum noted.  But one way or another, China’s actions are shining a searing spotlight on some of the hidden dependencies of technology innovation, and some of the less obvious challenges to developing technology-based solutions to problems in what is becoming an increasingly resource-constrained world, no matter how you look at it.

]]> http://2020science.org/2010/10/20/limited-resources-and-emerging-technologies-china-does-the-math/feed/ 0 http://2020science.org/2010/10/14/rehabilitating-risk/ http://2020science.org/2010/10/14/rehabilitating-risk/#comments Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:03:25 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=3649

Now that I’ve had some time to get to grips with my new position as Director of the University of Michigan Risk Science Center, I thought it was high time I started letting people know something about where the Center will be heading over the next few years.  Cross-posted on the Risk Science Center’s home page, here’s a flavor of where we’re going:

Risk is often treated as a four-letter word, or an embarrassing relative – something distasteful that shouldn’t be mentioned in polite society. Yet the reality is that a clear understanding of risk and how to deal with it is essential to every aspect of our lives. The past hundred years have left us a horrifying legacy of what goes wrong when people ignore risks, or fail to identify, access and manage them appropriately, or aren’t equipped to make informed decisions as new potential issues arise. And the challenges are only going to get tougher in today’s increasingly technology-dependent, interconnected and resource-constrained world. Without a doubt, if we are to build a sustainable future in the 21st century, we need to rethink our approach to risk. We need integrative, cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding and managing risks that are inclusive of all stakeholders. We need to push the process of identifying and addressing potential risks up-stream in the innovation process. And we need to equip everyone from citizens to CEO’s and journalists to policy makers to make informed decisions in the face of increasing uncertainty and complexity.

When I accepted the directorship of the Risk Science Center earlier this year, it was this forward-looking challenge that was uppermost in my mind… We already have a strong tradition at the University of Michigan and elsewhere of assessing risks to human health through research in areas like toxicology, epidemiology and exposure, and using generated data to drive decisions on risk management and mitigation. But we struggle to deal with emergent risks presented by new technologies (or new ways of using old technologies) in a changing world. Everyone does – there is no manual (yet) for how to address human health risks from increasingly complex technologies, and how to do this in a society where stakeholder and citizen engagement is becoming increasingly important, where uncertainty dominates the decision-making process, and where ill-informed decisions on risks and benefits could be potentially catastrophic.

So my aim is for the Risk Science Center to spearhead the movement toward a new risk paradigm. By integrating cutting edge science, multi-stakeholder partnerships and effective communication, the Center will be working towards avoiding harm from existing and emerging technologies while ensuring their benefits are fully realized. It’s an approach that will significantly reduce the chances of future adverse health impacts – but it’s also one that makes sound business sense.

This is still very much a work in progress. Over the next year the governance structure of the Center will be established, it’s vision, mission, aims and activities will be further developed, and this website will undergo a major overhaul – creating a resource and community nexus for stakeholders, faculty and students engaged in thinking differently about risk.

In the meantime, please check out the Risk Science Center’s about page for further information on how the Center is developing. And keep an eye out for new initiatives coming out of the Center – including next year’s Bernstein Symposium on “Risk, Uncertainty and Sustainable Innovation: New Perspectives on Emerging Challenges”.

Risk may still be a four-letter word to some, but that’s going to have to change if we as a society are going to tackle the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century and come out on top. As the Risk Science Center develops, expect it to be front and center of this change.

For more information, check out the Risk Science Center’s website.

Sometime in the past couple of weeks – I’m not entirely sure when as accounts are conflicting – the World Technology Evaluation Center (WTEC) posted a draft of a new report examining the long-term impacts and research directions of nanotechnology.  The “Nano2″ study was supported by the National Science Foundation under the direction of Mike Roco, and included input from an impressive array of nano-experts from round the world.  What resulted was a 13 chapter behemoth of a report on the current state and next ten years of nanotechnology worldwide.

Having just started to look through the report (I was traveling when it was posted … I think) I can’t really comment on it’s overall relevance and authority.  But if the chapter dealing with environment, health and safety (EHS) issues is anything to go by, this is a report to take seriously…

The EHS chapter (chapter 4) is authored by twelve recognized experts in the field of nano-risks, and presents a comprehensive perspective on near-term research challenges and opportunities.  The chapter is far from perfect – as you would expect, it reflects the perspectives and interests of the authors – but then most reports of this type do.  It also contains some rather jangling statements. For instance on the first page the definition of “the environmental, health and safety (EHS) of nanomaterials” seems to miss out environmental impact beyond “animal health”.  And a rather outmoded focus on educating the public on page 25, where the authors state

“A key issue therefore is for academia, industry and government is to find appropriate mechanisms to reach consensus, and effectively communicate and educate the public on the beneficial implications of nanotechnology, the potential for risk, and what is being done to ensure safe implementation of the technology.”

Mmm, not quite what they are teaching in engagement 101 these days!

But this is a draft, and these and other questionable statements do not detract from the overall usefulness of the chapter.

In many ways, the chapter reflects challenges that have been raised before.  Many of the issues highlighted can be traced back to the 2006 commentary in Nature I co-authored on nanotechnology safety challenges, and a number of reports that preceded it.  So questions surrounding exposure monitoring, toxicity screening, predictive modeling, safety by design and taking a life cycle approach to emerging nanomaterials abound.  But many of these are unpacked and explored in a fresh and useful way in this document. There is also a very welcome tie-in to risk-governance [a topic near and dear to my heart, having just co-edited a forthcoming book on the subject], reflecting the need for integrative approaches to understanding and addressing the challenges presented by engineered nanomaterials.

That said, the report fails to break out of old ruts when it comes to identifying materials of concern.  The old chestnuts are there – carbon nanotubes, zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, nano-silver and the like.  But there’s little mention of the next wave of emerging nanomaterials – nanoscale cellulose for instance, or active nanomaterials.  Neither do prevalent but poorly studied engineered nanomaterials like platinum/palladium nanoparticles in auto catalysts get a look-in.  Granted that the document is only looking forward 10 years, but it would have been good to have seen more thought given to complex nanomaterials, and novel approaches to exploring whether they present emergent risks, and how to handle them.

That aside though, this chapter is a strong addition to the literature on nanomaterial risks, and how we need to start addressing them – from risk identification and assessment through to risk management, mitigation and avoidance.  The areas highlighted for further research/action aren’t comprehensive, but they are important.  These include:

• Developing validated nano-EHS screening methods and harmonized protocols that promote standardized engineered nanomaterials risk assessment at levels commensurate with the growth of nanotechnology.
• Developing risk reduction strategies that can be implemented incrementally through commercial nanoproduct data collection, regulatory activity, and EHS research directly linked to decision-making.
• Developing a clearly defined strategy for nano-EHS governance that is compatible with incremental knowledge generation and stepwise decision-making
• Developing computational analysis methods capable of providing in silico modeling of nano-EHS risk assessment and modeling.
• Developing high-throughput and high-content screening as a universal tool for studying nanomaterial toxicology, ranking hazards, prioritizing animal studies and nano-Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship models, and guiding the safe design of nanomaterials.
• Improving safety screening and safe design of nanomaterials used in therapeutics and diagnostics.
• Developing advanced instrumentation and analytical methods for more competent and reliable engineered nanomaterial characterization, and detection in complex biological and environmental media.
• Development of computational models, algorithms, and multidisciplinary resources for increasingly sophisticated predictive modeling.
• Developing workforce capacity through interdisciplinary education and training, particularly in the nano-EHS field, where a large number of research areas are converging.

If you have an interest in nanotechnology impacts, I would definitely put the chapter on your reading list.  If you are actively involved in the field – it’s a must-read.

I mentioned that this is a draft report, and it’s actually open for public comment – you can sign up to comment here.  But you’d better be fast – just as there is some ambiguity over when the draft was posted, there is also ambiguity over when the comment period closes.  One source suggests it could be the end of this week – but I couldn’t find any confirmation of that.  So the sooner you get reading and commenting, the better!

This week I exchanged the maze of academia for an entirely different maze – I spent most of the week at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China.

World Economic Forum meetings are usually rather grand, complex, intimidating, stimulating and serendipitous affairs, and this was no exception.  Built around the theme of “driving growth through sustainability” (a subtly clever theme I thought), it brought together business, government and community leaders from around the world (together with a smattering of academics and others) to discuss and explore sustainable solutions to emerging challenges.

In the words of the supporting material,

“Sustainability requires committing to a new mindset – one that is determined to challenge long-held economic assumptions, rethink business models and explore scientific and technological solutions to foster innovation and creativity within organizations. As the global population moves from 6 billion to 9 billion, it is also a mindset that defines sustainability in the broadest terms, beyond its ecological impact, to develop a more holistic, systemic and integrated approach to leadership. Therefore, driving growth through sustainability is fundamental for global, national and business competitiveness in the 21st century.”

There was a lot of food for thought generated at the meeting, which is going to take some time to digest.  And as this is my weekly roundup, I’m going to resist the temptation to engage in deep analysis at this stage.  But in winding down as I travel back to Michigan, I did want to capture some of the more trivial highs (and lows) of the week here.

At one of the earlier sessions I attended, a rather bright researcher from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) talked about an innovative new product he is developing in his lab – History Glasses.  The glasses have an embedded camera and a single electrode that rests on the relevant part of the head when you wear them.  Whenever the wearer experiences a “wow” moment (in the words of the inventor), the camera takes a picture of whatever they are looking at – so you end up with a record of all those moments in your day/week/year that involuntarily capture your attention.

Being rather enamored by this idea, I thought I would use this week’s Lost in the Maize as my virtual “History Camera” of the Tianjin meetings – capturing some of those “wow” moments from the week.  Be warned though – just as the history camera doesn’t necessarily capture what you might expect, these are a rather eclectic collection of experiences!

Night driving between Beijing and Tianjin. Being driven in a coach between Beijing airport and Tianjin en the evening, I came away with the impression that there is just one rule for night driving in China – don’t hit anyone if you can avoid it.

Augmented reality – who needs it? A panel of four speakers tried to convince the audience that augmented reality is the next big thing.  (For the uninitiated, this is where a real-time image of reality captured on a cell phone, for instance, is overlaid with information, animations, or just about anything else). There certainly seems to be a growing demand for it.  But the question was left unanswered – will it make us any happier?

Water food and energy. In standing with the meeting’s theme, there was a heavy emphasis here on addressing the looming water, energy and food crises that global society will face over the next few decades.  What was surprising to a number of people – including myself – was how high up people’s agenda water was.

‘We’ll run out of water before we run out of oil” This from Peter Braebeck-Letmathe, Chairman of the Board for Nestlé

People – everywhere! The number of volunteers and others helping out at the meeting was truly impressive – everywhere you went, there was someone at your elbow offering aid.  This got a bit much though when bathroom attendants insisted in helping you wash your hands!

Nanosilver bug-killers. Who would have thought I would learn something new about nanotech at a WEF meeting!  Some provocative micrographs were presented of nanoscale silver particles disrupting the outer membranes of bacteria – but because the work hasn’t been published yet I can’t say much more than this at the moment, apart from stay tuned…

More people! At a cultural event hosted by the City of Tianjin we were greeted by what must have been a corridor of at least two hundred perfectly turned out attendants – alternating men and women dressed in traditional costume.  Walking down the line was simultaneously impressive and humbling.

Serendipitous taxi-sharing. This is a WEF tradition.  Heading back from the cultural event I bumped into the person responsible for the Young Scientist program at WEF (an initiative by UNESCO to get young scientists involved in the World Economic Forum) and had a great conversation about raising the profile of science and scientists within the organization.

Smart scientists. On the subject of scientists, I was impressed by the Ideas Lab with Young Scientists attending the meeting.  Each had 5 minutes/15 slides (timed) to introduce their work to a lay audience, followed by breakout discussions on significant challenges and opportunities they were facing.  This is a great format for engaging people in science, and one that I really need to explore further.

Awareness based collective action. In a session chaired by Tom Friedman, C. Otto Sharmer (MIT) introduced this great concept to aid the development of innovation in a technologically and socially complex world.

Tom Friedman’s column. …and while Otto was talking, Tom was furiously scribbling.  After a pause, he noted he was just writing a column – raising a round of applause from the audience.  (If he does write about Otto’s ideas, it’ll be a piece worth looking out for).

Arts meet science. Another serendipitous taxi ride – this time with an arts curator/promoter from India.  We quickly realized that the challenges and opportunities she faces in engaging people in the arts are remarkably similar to those faced by science engagement – and that there’s tremendous scope for the two worlds to come together in innovative new ways.

Day driving between Tianjin and Beijing. On the way back to the airport I had the chance to observe the Tianjin traffic in daylight, and the only word I can think of to describe the functioning confusion of cars, trucks, bikes, carts and trolleys is “organic”.  I suspect the day-time driving rule is “don’t get closer than 2 inches to other road users – if you can avoid it”.

Beijing airport.  Impressive.  If I was wearing my history glasses, I’d have some photos!

The inventor of the History Camera is already talking to a couple of manufacturers, so that’s something to look out for.  The only potential problem is that, in early trials with students, users ended up with endless pictures of handbags (if they were girls) or women’s legs (if they were boys).  Leaving the question – is this the sort of history consumers are really going to want to remember?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

You’ve heard the rumors and read the hype – but what really goes on at the Singularity University, based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley?  Nature’s Nicola Jones recently went along to take a look, and her report has just been posted – it’s well worth reading.

The Singularity University was co-founded in 2008 by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis – two people not known for being shy and retiring when it comes to new ideas.  The mission is to

“assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges”

Each year the University runs an intense ten-week summer school for graduates, leading to something that Nicola – from a brief visit this August – describes as a “think tank mashed with a geek adventure camp and a business-networking cocktail party”.

When Nicola was writing her piece, she contacted a number of people – including me – for opinions and insight into the Singularity University. This is what I wrote:

Hi Nicola,

This is a bit of a tough assignment for me as I can only assess the SU from what I read on the web, and what I know of various people involved.  I’m actually quite envious of you spending some time there – would love to hear how it comes across on the ground.

From what I know and have read about the SU, I am a little conflicted in my thoughts.  On the one hand, I don’t buy into the vision that some of the people involved preach – I think that Kurzweil’s concept of the singularity is naive for instance, and that a number of the people involved in the SU – while extremely bright – have a somewhat narrow perspective on how science, technology and society work.  But…

…that said, there are two aspects of the SU that excite and intrigue me:  First is the idea of bringing innovative and imaginative thinkers together in a high intensity environment.  Academia is notoriously conservative, and this often has a limiting influence on research and its application that can hold back innovation.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it means that progress is often slow and steady, but is more likely to be grounded on tested truths.  Yet there are occasions where less constrained thinking could lead to significant innovation – this is becoming increasingly the case I suspect as different technologies begin to converge and open up possibilities of synergistic and non-linear advances.  It’s even possible to argue that disruptive or non-linear innovation – new advances that make a break from previous ones, rather than being evolutionary – are only really possible within a system that encourages intellectual risk-taking.  Over the past 50 to 100 years, science fiction writing has been the stimulus for many scientists to follow unconventional lines of thought.  I’m not sure how acceptable it is these days though for scientists to claim they were inspired by fiction – it certainly doesn’t fit the mould of how kids are taught science works!  So maybe there is a need for opportunities that allow scientists and engineers to let their imaginations run a little wild.  And just as science fiction can stimulate sound science and technology, maybe we shouldn’t get too hung up about how realistic or grounded some of the ideas floating around in the SU are.

The second aspect that excites and intrigues me is the idea of encouraging new and innovative thinking on technology-based solutions to pressing problems.  I’m a firm believer in the importance of science and technology in delivering solutions to global problems in today’s increasingly interconnected and resource-constrained world.  Looking to a future where nine billion people plus are struggling to survive and thrive on a planet where energy, water and other natural resources are increasingly at a premium, it is hard to imagine solutions that don’t rely on new applications of science and technology.  Yet the conventional ways that we use science and technology almost definitely are not up to the job of ensuring a sustainable future.  We have a naive trust in science and technology to deliver innovative solutions to problems, but we still struggle to invest with foresight in technology innovation.  We haven’t yet cracked how to ensure technology innovation solves the problems we need it to solve, rather than the problems it can solve (we are good at creating devices we never knew we needed, while people still die of disease, starve and go without water).  And we struggle to ensure the responsible development and application of innovation, in ways that benefit people without causing undue harm.  Part of the problem is that we are trapped on outmoded ways of doing things – we need a shakeup in how science and technology are developed and used to benefit society.  And this is where the SU seems to remove some of the constraints on thinking about what is possible that have limited our effective use of science and technology.

I still have my reservations about a program that runs the risk of running close to pseudoscience at times.  But without the benefit of experience, I would be prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt as a generator of innovative thinking that might possibly help ensure the effective use of science and technology in improving society around the world – as long as there are checks and balances to ensure imaginations are grounded at some point in the possible, rather than fantasy.

Inevitably, it’s my reservations about the Singularity University that come out in Nicola’s piece more than my excitement.  But that’s how these things go.

Having read the Nature piece, I still have my concerns over some aspects of the Singularity University.  But I must confess, if the call came asking me to head out there to help out – even if it was just making the tea – you wouldn’t  see my feet for dust! This is a place that calls out to my inner-geek – big time!

Without a doubt, the world needs spaces where people can inspire each other to think big ideas and to think about what it would take to make them work – without the constraints of pedants, skeptics and naysayers.  The Singularity University is one of those spaces.

Yet at some point, we also need spaces where people can inspire each other to think big and innovative ideas about how technology and society can come together to build a sustainable future – not just an exciting one.

I’m not sure that space exists yet.

]]> http://2020science.org/2010/09/15/ten-weeks-to-save-the-world-nature-does-the-singularity-university/feed/ 3 http://2020science.org/2010/08/24/value-added-nanotechnology/ http://2020science.org/2010/08/24/value-added-nanotechnology/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:00:33 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=3498

The more the debate over what precisely nanotechnology is goes on, the more inclined I am to think that it’s something of an illusion.  Sure, nanoscale science is real.  And there are clearly technologies that exploit this.  But are they nanotechnologies, or are they simply clever uses of science, technology and engineering across multiple length scales to do something different?  In other words, does nanoscale science simply lead to… technology?  This piece from September 2008 hints at this line of thinking as it grapples with what “nanotechnology” actually means.

Originally posted September 3 2008.

Amidst the cacophony of debate swirling around the true meaning of nanotechnology, I head a voice or reason last week.  The voice was that of Dr. Bernd Sachweh of BASF, speaking at the European Aerosol Conference in Thessoloniki.

I paraphrase, but the essence of Bernd’s point was this:

‘Nano’ is not a thing or a product.  It has no intrinsic value.  Rather, ‘nano’ adds value; it changes the properties and the worth of something that already exists.

I must confess, I rather like the idea of ‘nano’ as adding value, rather than being an entity in and of itself.  It’s hard to come up with of an example where engineering something at the nanoscale leads to behaviour or functionality that is independent of the starting material.  Rather, the great potential of nanotechnology would seem to be in taking raw materials and engineering them in ways that lead to the emergence of novel scale-related properties, which can then be used in new and innovative ways.

But what I really like about the concept of added-value is that it provides insight into how nanotechnology might be approached from an oversight perspective.

Just as ‘nano’ adds value to products and processes, it can also be seen as changing the potential of something to cause harm; an “added-risk” to counterbalance the “added-value.”

As soon as ‘nano’ is seen in terms of both added-value and added-risk, it becomes easier to think through some of the more knotty questions associated with using nanomaterials and nano-products safely.

First off is the question of whether all products of nanotechnology are uniquely harmful.

Unique nanoscale-related functionality features in many definitions of nanotechnology—this is where the added value comes from.  And it is often assumed that this unique functionality will always equate to unique risks.  Yet unlike added-value, added-risk is not intentionally built into the products of nanotechnology.  Rather, it is a by-product of the technology.

As a result, added-risk may be significant in some cases, while in others it may be negligible.  It is even conceivable that engineering a material at the nanoscale could reduce the risk it presents to human health and the environment—leading to negative added-risk.  From an oversight perspective, functionality and potential to cause harm sometimes need to be disentangled—something that the concepts of added-value and added-risk might help to achieve.

Following this line of thought, effective nanotechnology oversight will depend on identifying whether engineering a material at the nanoscale results in added-risk.  And implementing such oversight will mean identifying, measuring and controlling those aspects of a new product or material that add to the risk—whether they are related to particle size, material surface area, surface chemistry, or other nano-relevant characteristics.

But does nanotechnology demand a brand new set of regulations, or can the existing ones cope?  Where existing regulations work for conventional materials and products, the concept of added-risk would seem to support developing new rules on applying current regs to nanotech materials and products, rather than formulating a new set of nanotechnology regulations.  After all, if ‘nano’ has no intrinsic value or risk, what will a brand new set of regulations actually regulate?

The caveat here of course is that the existing regulations need to be sufficiently robust yet flexible to address the added-risk that some nanotechnology applications will embody.  And the evidence is that this isn’t the case for every material or product out there! (See for instance, “Managing the effects of Nanotechnology” by J. Clarence Davies)

Sticking with existing regulations, the concept of added-risk is useful when it comes to defining what is ‘nano’ and what is not from an oversight perspective.

If the aim is for regulations (in the broadest sense) to address the added-risk rather than the added-value of nanotech materials and products, should definitions of nanotechnology be used that emphasize added-value?  Probably not.  Definitions that depend on the uniqueness and “added-value” of nanotechnology are great for guiding and inspiring research and investment that will lead to new nanotechnology-based products.  But where they do not embody the concept of “added-risk,” they are at best inadequate and at worst seriously misleading when it comes to ensuring the safety of new nanotechnologies.  For instance, gold nanoparticles can bring significant added-value to products when incorporated into heterogeneous catalysts, but if release and exposure are low, added-risk is likely to be minimal.  On the other hand, reducing the size of silver particles to 20 nanometers brings only marginal added-value from a nanotechnology perspective (the physical and chemical properties of the silver do not alter appreciably from the bulk material at this size), yet the increased possibility for release, dispersion and exposure most likely leads to significant added-risk in some cases.

For regulatory purposes, something else is needed—a point hammered home by Mike Taylor in his 2006 assessment of the US Food and Drug Administration’s ability to regulate the products of nanotechnology.  In this respect, it would be far more useful to have a definition of nanotechnology that incorporates the idea that nanoscale engineering can lead to significant changes in the potential risks associated with a material.  Something like:

For regulatory and oversight purposes, nanotechnology is the control of matter at dimensions between approximately 1 and 100 nm, where the behaviour of the resulting material or product differs sufficiently from the component materials to lead to significant changes in potential risks to human health and the environment.

This is a definition that is based on added-risk, not added-value.  And unlike the more commonly used definitions of nanotechnology, it would encompass engineered nanomaterials where the predominant change in moving from the macroscale (or molecular scale) to the nanoscale is an increased potential for release, transport, accumulation, exposure dose, and biological impact.

Developing an added-risk based definition along these lines (and this is just an example of what a definition might look like) would include a broad range of materials and products that have an altered risk profile because of how they have been engineered; not just those that lie within the somewhat artificial boundaries of 1 to 100 nm.  In effect, there would be no more need for lengthy arguments about whether a 99 nm particle is a nanoparticle for regulatory purposes but a 101 is not; or whether large molecules should be treated as nanomaterials.  Under such a definition, the determiner of relevance would be added-risk, NOT size.

This all sounds great.  But I do have one niggling concern about this idea of added-risk.  And that is how will it apply to the more esoteric products of nanotechnology that are coming along—the increasingly complex second, third and even fourth generation materials that have multiple components, multiple functionalities, and can respond and adapt to their environments and other stimuli.  Here we are moving from adding value to existing materials and technologies, to building brand new materials and technologies.  Will we still be able to think of oversight in terms of added-risk, or will we need to go back to the drawing board?

That’s a tricky one and I’m not sure the answer is clear yet.  But given the current rate of progress being made in nanotechnology, we could do with some answers sooner rather than later.  In the meantime, seeing nanotechnology in terms of the added-value and added-risk it brings to materials, processes and products might just help deal with the nanotech which is out there now.

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The full August in the Archives 2010 series can be browsed here

In February 2008, the National Academy of Engineering launched 14 grand challenges for engineering.  These were the inspiration for this post, but rather than focus on the challenges themselves, I thought it would be interesting to consider how science and technology are going to help address them.  Over two years on, the ideas I was writing about here seem more relevant than ever – as I write this, I am putting the finishing touches to a World Economic Forum report that echoes many of the challenges I outlined back in March 2008.

Originally posted March 6 2008

Can current approaches to doing science sustain us over the next one hundred years?  An increasing reliance on technological fixes to global challenges — including nanotechnology — demands a radical rethink of how we use science in the service of society.

Over the next century we will perhaps be facing the greatest challenge in the history of humanity: sustaining six billion plus people on a planet where natural resources are running scarce and our every action results in a palpable environmental reaction.  Progress towards sustainability will only come through integrating relevant science with socially-responsible decision making.  Yet the science policy dogmas of the 20th century may be stretched to breaking point in the face of 21st century challenges.

And these challenges are immense. The U.S. National Academy of Engineering recently published 14 “grand challenges for engineering” — the culmination of a year-long project exploring and reviewing the greatest technological challenges facing us in the 21st century.  At the top of the list is development of economical solar energy and fusion-energy, followed by crafting carbon sequestration methods, improving access to clean water, creating improved medicines, preventing nuclear terror, and eight other pressing needs.  The challenges are a stark reminder of the limitations of our current capabilities, and what needs to change if we are to continue growing as a society in harmony with our surroundings.

The solutions to many of these challenges will come from emerging areas of science and technology that include nanotechnology, as well as areas such as synthetic biology and cognitive science — the science of how we use our mind to think and learn.  These are not the physics, chemistry and biology of 20th century science.  Rather, they represent a blurring of the boundaries between conventional disciplines — a mixing-up of ideas and concepts that has the potential to stimulate tremendous innovation.

For example, nanotechnology combines elements of physics and chemistry to find new solutions to old problems.  Cheap, efficient solar cells and access to clean water are just two areas that this emerging technology is showing promise in.  But combine the ideas of nanotechnology with molecular biology and you open the door to playing with the building blocks of life itself — DNA.  Imagine what we could achieve by inventing new organisms that harvest energy, clean up pollution, and build new materials atom by atom.  Sounds like science fiction, but simple nanotechnologies are already being used in daily life; and synthetic biology is rapidly becoming a reality, with the first artificially constructed bacterium genome reported in January of this year.

In addressing the major challenges of the 21st century, it is the convergence of these new technologies that will deliver the solutions.  But policymakers, scientists and engineers will only be able to transform the new knowledge from research to practice if strong policies and frameworks are in place to support and nurture these emerging technologies. 20th century science and technology thrived on the twin dogmas of partitioned disciplines and knowledge diffusion.  Vast investment in basic research was thought to lead — eventually — to technological solutions; a Darwinian natural selection of the best ideas generated by self-absorbed researchers.  And while “interdisciplinary collaboration” was the mantra of many a grant proposal, few ventured far from the comfort of their particular disciplinary caste.

But if 21st century solutions are to be found to 21st century challenges, we need a new way of doing science.  This “smart science” must train future practitioners to work across conventional boundaries and remove the barriers to interdisciplinary research that continue to persist.  It must be socially relevant.  And it must engage citizens at every level — with the recognition that scientists need to be socially literate, as much as citizens need to be scientifically literate.

It is no exaggeration to say the state of the world our children’s children inherit will depend on the choices we make now, and one of the critical choices will be how we will develop and use science in the service of society. As we approach the 2008 U.S. presidential election, there is a ground-swell within the American scientific community in support of a presidential science debate.  While the idea of politicians talking science might have minority appeal, the consequences of bad science policy will have a major impact — and one that will be felt much sooner than the end of the century or even the end of the next term of office.

The end of the 21st century might look a long way off.  But it is the choices we make now that will determine the consequences our grandchildren and their children are faced with.  20th century approaches to science got us a long way, but they lack what it takes to address the challenges now facing us.  Nanotechnology and other emerging technologies that hold the seeds of future will not and cannot be sustained by 20th century thinking.  Instead, we need a 21st century approach to science to get us through the next one hundred years — and we need it sooner rather than later.

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The full August in the Archives 2010 series can be browsed here

I‘m going to be taking a break from 2020 Science over the next few weeks, as I finally make the move with my family from DC to Ann Arbor.  But rather than let the blog languish, I thought I would use this as an opportunity to revisit some of my old posts.  So through August, I will be digging up and re-posting blogs from summer 2008 that still have some relevance.

These will be posted every Tuesday and Thursday through August – starting on August 3.  You can get them delivered automatically via email by following this link.   Or you can simply check in each week to see what’s new.

Either way, I hope you enjoy the retrospective.

And if you do, please feel free to leave a comment, or retweet the posts on Twitter (you can use that little retweet badge at the top of the page!).

Have a great summer, and see you all in September.

Cheers,

Andrew

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The full August in the Archives 2010 series can be browsed here

A few weeks ago, I set Friends of the Earth a challenge - What is your worst case estimate of the human health risk from titanium dioxide and/or zinc oxide nanoparticles in sunscreens?

The challenge came out of an article from FoE on nanomaterials and sunscreens, which I subsequently critiqued on 2020 Science.  Georgia Miller and Ian Illuminto from FoE kindly responded to my challenge – not by rising to it as such, but by fleshing out the justification for the position that they take on nanomaterials and sunscreens.

That post led to a useful discussion on the issues, with comments from the NGO community, regulators and respected scientists – it’s one that I would highly recommend anyone interested in nanomaterials and sunscreens reading.

To wrap things up (for the time being), I thought it would be worth reflecting on some of the issues raised by Georgia and Ian in their response, and the ensuing discussion:

Getting nanomaterials’ use in context. First, Georgia and Ian, very appropriately in my opinion, brought up the societal context within which new technologies and products are developed and used:

“why not support a discussion about the role of the precautionary principle in the management of uncertain new risks associated with emerging technologies? Why not explore the importance of public choice in the exposure to these risks? Why not contribute to a critical discussion about whose interests are served by the premature commercialisation of products about whose safety we know so little, when there is preliminary evidence of risk and very limited public benefit.”

This is a legitimate issue, and one that is touched on by a number of people in the comments.  Decisions on what is developed, what people are exposed to, who decides what is appropriate and what is not, and who pays the consequences while who reaps the benefits, go far beyond the science and technology itself.  This is touched on by Jennifer Sass from NRDC:

I strongly support a dialogue that has space for both scientific calculations and values and perceptions of risk. We need to make that dialogue public, inclusive, transparent, and thoughtful. Risk is more than a number – its a face, a person, a community.

Guillermo Foladorio also touches on this broader societal context:

We have here 2 kind of issues. One is the “scientific” knowledge (are nano-sunscreens harmful?). This is a never endend issue. Science is a process and not a fact. The other issue, although hidden, is of great importance: focusing on a never ended scientific discussion is the field that corporations like, in the meanwhile the market of such products grows and consolidates, aside from any wondering of the needs for such new stuff; or better which percentage of the population will benefit in the case.

I would suggest that forcing a technology on society has never been acceptable behavior.  But it has certainly been easier to do in the past.  These days though, we live in a much more crowded, resource-constrained and interconnected world than ever before.  Which means that the consequences of ill-conceived technology implementation are magnified, and the dynamics of introducing new – and possibly beneficial – technologies – are far more complex than they were in the past.

This means that we need to think critically about the broader societal issues associated with technology innovation, and we need to push the dialogue further upstream in the development process – a point Jeff Morris from EPA makes.  This means rethinking how we make decisions in partnership across society, and how we begin to apply ideas like the precautionary principle in a complex world – a point eloquently made by Richard Jones.

But it also means that we need to think carefully about how we use scientific knowledge and data – “evidence” – in making decisions.

Evidence-informed decision-making. At some point, decisions need to be based on information, and in the long run you cannot get away with making that information up!  It’s one thing to evaluate critically the current state of evidence in making decisions, but quite another to preferentially select evidence that supports a predetermined position.  Yet the latter is often the default position when it comes to influencing decisions – whether by policymakers or consumers.

Having worked at the heart of science-based policy in the US for a number of years, I’m all too familiar with the line of argument that goes “what do we want to achieve?” followed by “what evidence can we find that supports us?”.  Yet this is an approach that ultimately devalues the importance of evidence in making decisions, one that can have serious adverse consequences when decisions are made on dodgy information, and one that is patently unsustainable in the long run.

My original critique of FoE’s article challenged their use of “evidence” in supporting the position they took.  To me, they showed a tendency to use selective pieces of information to sow seeds of doubt in the mind of the reader, rather than to empower the reader to make informed decisions. The social agenda was a laudable one – the use of selective science sound-bytes, less so.

This begins to come out when you read the comments on Georgia and Ian’s response from three scientists who have worked on nanoscale materials on the skin.  Despite FoE’s implications that nanoparticles in sunscreens might cause cancer because they are photoactive, Peter Dobson points out that there are nanomaterials used in sunscreens that are designed not to be photoactive. Brian Gulson, who’s work on zinc skin penetration was cited by FoE, points out that his studies only show conclusively that zinc atoms or ions can pass through the skin, not that nanoparticles can pass through.  He also notes that the amount of zinc penetration from zinc-based sunscreens is very much lower than the level of zinc people have in their body in the first place.  Tilman Butz, who led one of the largest projects on nanoparticle penetration through skin to date, points out that – based on current understanding – the nanoparticles used in sunscreens are too large to penetrate through the skin.

These three comments alone begin to cast the potential risks associated with nanomaterials in sunscreens in a very different light to that presented by FoE.  Certainly there are still uncertainties about the possible consequences of using these materials – no-one is denying that.  But the weight of evidence suggests that nanomaterials within sunscreens – if engineered and used appropriately – do not present a clear and present threat to human health.

Yet, because there are uncertainties still, we cannot afford to be complacent here.

Handling uncertainty. And this brings me to the thorny issue of uncertainty.  When we are lacking absolute evidence on safety or risk, what do we do – do we halt progress until we are sure about how safe something is, or do we muddle along until more information is available?

This question is becoming increasingly important as the rate of technology innovation – and the complexity of emerging technologies – accelerates.  Consumers, regulators, businesses and others are being forced more and more to make decisions in the face of increasing uncertainty.  At the same time, we are dependent on technology innovation as a global society – although the idea of “going back to basics” is an attractive one, it’s not going to help the marginalized in an overcrowded and resource-constrained world.  Rather, we need new ideas on how to use science and technology in ways that ensure as many people as possible have an acceptable quality of life.

The question is, how do we do this when we cannot be sure of how safe or dangerous a new technology is?

The Precautionary Principle is one approach – and a very misunderstood and misused one – to addressing this, and one brought up by FoE and others in the context of sunscreens.  It has many formulations – it’s not a hard and fast principle.  But it is currently described in the European Union in this way:

The precautionary principle should be informed by three specific principles:

• implementation of the principle should be based on the fullest possible scientific evaluation. As far as possible this evaluation should determine the degree of scientific uncertainty at each stage;
• any decision to act or not to act pursuant to the precautionary principle must be preceded by a risk evaluation and an evaluation of the potential consequences of inaction;
• once the results of the scientific evaluation and/or the risk evaluation are available, all the interested parties must be given the opportunity to study of the various options available, while ensuring the greatest possible transparency.

Besides these specific principles, the general principles of good risk management remain applicable when the precautionary principle is invoked. These are the following five principles:

• proportionality between the measures taken and the chosen level of protection;
• non-discrimination in application of the measures;
• consistency of the measures with similar measures already taken in similar situations or using similar approaches;
• examination of the benefits and costs of action or lack of action;
• review of the measures in the light of scientific developments.
• The burden of proof

This is a pragmatic principle, that looks to using evidence and an evaluation of consequences in making informed decisions in the face of uncertainty.  It certainly does not preclude the development or implementation of a new technology until there is certainty on safety.

The emphasis on the potential consequences of inaction are particularly relevant to today’s world, where we are stuck on a technological tight-rope, and where the consequences of not doing something may be more harmful than taking action.  Richard Jones picked up on this in his suggestion for a more relevant application of the Precautionary Principle to emerging technologies:

what are the benefits that the new technology provides – what are the risks and uncertainties associated with not realising these benefits?

what are the risks and uncertainties attached to any current ways we have of realising these benefits using existing technologies?

what are the risks and uncertainties of the new technology?

This seems a useful place to start from when faced with the reality of having to make the best possible decisions in the face of uncertainty, and where inaction isn’t a option.

But to make decisions – even when there are gaping holes in the data – you need something to go on.

So why did I pose the challenge in the first place? Despite suspicions from some that I was merely being provocative with this question, I asked it in all seriousness.  In the face of uncertainty, playing out different potential scenarios is a powerful tool in helping identify the magnitude and nature of the consequences of different choices.

When it comes to using nanomaterials in sunscreens, I genuinely would like to know whether in the worst case we are looking at mass illness and death, isolated cases of skin rashes, or something in between.  Because the likely implications of the use of such materials in the future have profound implications on the actions we take now.

If decisions are made now on futures that are unlikely to be realized, not only do we waste resources and effort, but we potentially endanger people’s lives through ill-informed choices.  This cuts both ways – if TiO2 and ZnO nanomaterials in sunscreens are likely to harm a significant number of people to a significant degree, action should be taken to avoid this as soon as possible.  But if the benefits are positive and the impacts likely to be inconsequential, inhibiting the use of such materials could cost lives.

Using the best available information to work through possible scenarios provides insight into which futures are more likely, and where efforts are best focused.  This isn’t about setting exposure levels or conducting quantitative risk assessments – it’s about helping people making informed choices.

And who should do this?  I think any group that has a stake in how contemporary decisions affect future outcomes has a part to play.  I focused on FoE because they were pushing the issue.  And I think they have sufficient people they can draw on to make a stab at working through some scenarios and estimating likely impact.

But at the end of the day, this is something that all stakeholders should be involved in.

Because these are decisions that we are all going to have to live with the consequences of.

ASME – the organization that used to be known as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers – has just launched a series of educational podcasts on nanotechnology that are well worth checking out.

Between now and next February, the ASME Nanotechnology Institute will be posting new video and/or audio podcasts on their website every couple of weeks, covering a wide range of nanotechnology topics.

The podcasts are free, but you need to register with the site first before you can access them at http://nano.asme.org/Nano_Educational_Series.cfm However, to give you a feel for series, here’s the introductory video:

You may recognize one of the presenters   I spent a grueling four hours filming with ASME last year for the series – so it’s good to see I don’t look too worn out and exhausted in the video.

I’m not sure where else I will be appearing in the series – we covered a huge range of topics during filming – but expect to see at least one podcast with me addressing some of the environmental and human health aspects of nanotechnology.

Overall, this looks like a well-produced and informative series of podcasts, that should be well worth following if you have an interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

The global financial crisis of 2008-09 laid bare the inadequacies of global systems in an increasingly interdependent world, and highlighted the need to rethink the “architecture of global cooperation” – the idea at the core of the World Economic Forum Global Redesign Initiative.  As the World Economic Forum publishes and discusses the outcomes of this intensive twelve month initiative, the critical need for up-front and integrated investment in sustainable technology innovation cannot afford to be overlooked.

If anyone is still in doubt that sustainable technology innovation depends on up-front investment in responsible development, just take a look at the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.  With strategic investment in planning for plausible outcomes, the unfolding environmental and human disaster could have been avoided, or at least substantially reduced.  Yet the failure to plan for the future and invest in technologies and strategies that would underpin safe and sustainable operations is indicative of a naive mindset within corporate and policy circles – that when problems occur, science and technology will deliver timely and effective solutions. 

Sadly, this is not the case.  In the face of high impact and increasingly complex technologies, new approaches are needed to developing the science, policies and tools that will underpin sustainable innovation.  This is at the center of a new proposal coming out of the World Economic Forum Global Redesign Agenda to develop a Global Center for Emerging Technology Intelligence – or CETI.  The proposed Center aims to ensure that governments, businesses and other stakeholder organizations are equipped to make the most effective use of science and technology innovation in addressing the global challenges of the 21st Century.

CETI is just one of many proposals in the recently-published World Economic Forum Report of the Global Redesign Agenda – Everybody’s Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World.

As Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum writes in the report’s preface,

“Our purpose has been to stimulate a strategic thought process among all stakeholders about ways in which international institutions and arrangements should be adapted to contemporary challenges. This report summarizes and interprets the significance of the proposals that the Forum’s many communities have developed in response to this challenge.”

The ideas and proposals presented in the report are essential reading for anyone concerned about sustainable growth in a changing world.  But, just as the recent financial collapse and the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico were caused in part by a lack of foresight and investment in the future, many of the ideas here assume that science and technology will underpin proposed actions.  The reality is though that this will only happen with strategic investment in sustainable technology innovation on a scale that, as yet, does not occur.

And this is where the Global Center for Emerging Technologies Intelligence comes in.

The full CETI proposal can be read here.  But the main details of the proposed Center are outlined below:

Context

Emerging technologies are critical to long-term global prosperity. They represent the innovation that adds necessary economic and social value to materials, products and processes. And they provide potential solutions to a wide range of pressing global challenges including energy generation and storage, health care, climate change, food security and access to clean water. Yet without better global cooperation on technology innovation, many potential emerging technologies will not mature to the point at which they can be used effectively.

Government and corporate decision-makers are foundering in a world dominated by rapid and unprecedented social and technological developments. They are limited in their ability to anticipate and respond to new developments and they lack the mechanisms necessary to work with non-traditional but increasingly influential stakeholder groups.

Proposal

The Global Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence will directly address this need. A neutral, transparent and authoritative organization, the Centre’s leaders and staff will work with decision-makers at the highest level in industry, government and other organizations in ensuring the best possible tools are available to support the successful and sustainable development and implementation of new technologies.

The mission of the Centre is to ensure that governments, businesses and other stakeholder organizations are equipped to make the most effective use of science and technology innovation in addressing the global challenges of the 21st Century.

Explanation/Rationale

Why a Global Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence Is Necessary

Science and technology have been at the heart of economic growth, social prosperity and improvements in quality of life for close to ten thousand years. From the agricultural revolution to the information revolution, advances in society around the globe have been underpinned by new discoveries, and their innovative use in new products and processes. Nearly 250 years ago, the invention of the Spinning Jenny vastly increased speed with which cotton could be turned into yarn, revolutionizing the textile industry and helping usher in the industrial revolution. The discovery of penicillin in the early 1900’s allowed previously fatal infections to be treated, opening the door to modern surgical procedures. In the mid twentieth century, the invention and subsequent development of the transistor initiated a technology revolution that is still driving economic and social growth. And more recently, innovations in global communication, social networking and information processing have begun to empower global communities in ways unimaginable a few years ago.

Yet despite the clear impact of these and other examples, the continued success of science and technology as an engine for economic and social growth is not guaranteed. Over the past few decades, global economic and social landscapes have shifted radically, leading to new thinking on how to tap into the potential offered by emerging technologies. A growing global population, coupled with a widespread desire for a first-world quality of life, is placing unprecedented demands on resources around the world. Humanity’s actions are becoming uniquely entwined in environmental reactions, redefining our relationship with the planet on which we live and depend. And modern communications are making a mockery of geographical and institutional boundaries that have endured for hundreds and thousands of years. These three factors not only place new demands on how emerging technologies are used; they also rewrite the rules for using them effectively.

Recent attempts to introduce genetically modified foods into commerce in Europe provide a sobering lesson in how easy it is to mishandle emerging technologies. Despite little evidence to the contrary, apparent concerns over health and environmental impacts severely retarded the implementation of a technology that could save and improve millions of lives around the world. Yet these concerns were grounded in a backlash against corporate control that cut consumers out of the decision-making process. And through a socially-savvy media, people were galvanized to say “no” to “frankenfoods” – not because of the science and technology, but because of the way they were handled.

Missteps over the development of genetically modified foods are a prominent case among many where the trajectory of a technology has been dictated by social concerns as much as scientific evidence. It is becoming increasingly clear that hierarchical, evidence-based decision-making is not sufficient on its own to ensure the success of new technologies. In part, the situation is exacerbated by peer to peer global communications, where virtual groups can be informed about, motivated by and empowered to take action on emerging issues before institutional decision-makers are even aware there is an issue to respond to. We now live in a world where an incident in China, or the Middle East, can influence attitudes and actions in regions like Europe and the Americas in a matter of minutes through media like FaceBook and Twitter.

The impact on realizing the social and economic potential of new technologies is potentially profound. Established approaches to government and corporate policy-making founder in the new social order, and are limited in their ability to anticipate and guide new developments effectively. They lack the responsiveness, adaptability and foresight to anticipate hurdles to progress, or to work through partnership with non-traditional but increasingly influential stakeholder groups – including consumers.

Yet this disconnect between established policy mechanisms and new approaches to implementing emerging technologies is occurring at a point where future global prosperity is more dependent than ever on new science-based solutions to pressing problems.

Providing people with access to healthy food and clean water; managing climate change and its impacts; treating disease; generating and using energy wisely; coping with pollution—over the next fifty years, global challenges in these and similar areas will reach an unprecedented level. Without rapid and targeted advances in science and technology, humanity will not be able to face them without paying a large price. Now, perhaps more than at any time in history, we need the tools that science and technology provide to face an uncertain future. And just as the challenges are global in scope, so the solutions will need to be global in reach.

In emerging areas such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology and geoengineering, there is growing awareness that a new paradigm is needed if the technologies are to be developed effectively—one that predicts and avoids potential hurdles, develops and implements new technologies in partnership with multiple stakeholders, identifies and addresses possible health and environmental impacts before they occur, and responds rapidly to new developments. Yet there is a gaping chasm between the knowledge that a different approach to policy-making is needed, and an understanding of what this new approach should look like.

This is the gap that the Global Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence will fill. Working with decision-makers at the highest level in industry, government and other organizations, it will aim to ensure that decision-makers have the best possible tools at their disposal to ensure the successful and sustainable development and implementation of new technologies.

The Goals of a Global Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence

Be an authoritative and neutral source of intelligence on emerging technologies and the opportunities and challenges they raise

The Centre will work towards becoming the premier go-to source of information on emerging technologies for decision-makers, the media and the public. This will be achieved through developing a global network of experts on emerging technology policy, potential and risks, building in-house expertise, producing high value/high impact products and working closely with the media. The Centre will also promote accessibility, inclusiveness and strategic partnerships in an attempt to bridge divides that can characteristic advance technologies.

Provide timely information on emerging opportunities and challenges

The Centre will develop in-house expertise in identifying, evaluating and assessing new opportunities and challenges related to emerging technologies. Assessments of emerging issues will be published and made publicly available on a regular basis.

Bring senior stakeholders together to identify emerging issues

The Centre will bring high-level experts and decision-makers together on an annual basis to identify emerging issues and inform a rolling two-year programme of targeted projects.

Publish targeted research, analysis and recommendations

Based on a two-year strategic plan, the Centre will publish analyses and recommendations on key emerging technology issues.

The bottom line here is that sustainable technology innovation doesn’t just happen – it requires sustained, strategic and substantial up-front investment in the knowledge, frameworks and policies that will allow innovation to address global challenges without creating new problems.  CETI is one approach to addressing this need.  But whether this proposal is developed or something else is adopted in its place, one thing is very clear – global redesign will not happen unless we rethink sustainable technology innovation.  And for that to happen, science and technology need to be pushed much further up the global agenda.

Last week’s announcement from the J. Craig Venter Institute that scientists had created the first-ever synthetic cell was a profoundly significant point in human history, and marked a turning point in our quest to control the natural world.  But the ability to use this emerging technology wisely is already being dogged by fears that we have embarked down a dangerous and morally dubious path.

It’s no surprise therefore that, hot on the heels of last week’s announcement, President Obama called for an urgent study to identify appropriate ethical boundaries and minimize possible risks associated with the breakthrough.

This was a bold and important move on the part of the White House.  But its success will lie in ensuring the debate over risks in particular is based on sound science, and not sidetracked by groundless speculation.

The new “synthetic biology” epitomized by the Venter Institute’s work – in essence the ability to design new genetic code on computers and then “download” it into living organisms – heralds a new era of potentially transformative technology innovation.  As if to underline this, the US House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce will be hearing testimony from Craig Venter and others on the technology’s potential on May 27th – just days after last week’s announcement.  But the technology also raises serious ethical and safety concerns: Is it right and proper to meddle with the fundamental basis of life?  What happens if the technology gets into the wrong hands? And what might occur when synthetic life meets the natural world?

Questions like these have challenged scientists, ethicists and decision makers for many years, and with good reason – our headlong charge into advanced genetic manipulation is taking us into uncharted and uncertain territory.  But the breakthroughs made by Craig Venter and his team place a new urgency on developing policies, ethics and research strategies in support of safe and acceptable synthetic biology.

The ethics in particular surrounding synthetic biology are far from clear; the ability to custom-design the genetic code that resides in and defines all living organisms challenges our very notions of what is right and what is acceptable.  Which is no doubt why President Obama wasted no time in charging the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to look into the technology.

But in placing ethics so high up the agenda, my fear is that more immediate safety issues might end up being overlooked.

It’s not that safety isn’t on the radar – there is already tremendous speculation over the potential impacts of synthetic biology.  But with one or two exceptions (including work from the J. Craig Venter Institute), there seems little science behind many of these conjectures.  And actions based on speculation alone may endanger the tremendous good that could come from this rapidly emerging technology, while potentially opening the door to unintended consequences.

Rather, scientists, policy makers and developers urgently need to consider how synthetic biology might legitimately lead to people and the environment being endangered, and how this is best avoided.

What we need is a science-based dialogue on potential emergent risks that present new challenges, the plausibility of these risks leading to adverse impacts, and the magnitude and nature of the possible harm that might result.  Only then will we be able to develop a science-based foundation on which to build a safe technology.

Synthetic biology is still too young to second-guess whether artificial microbes will present new risks; whether bio-terror or bio-error will result in harmful new pathogens; or whether blinkered short-cuts will precipitate catastrophic failure. But the sheer momentum and audacity of the technology will inevitably lead to new and unusual risks emerging.

And this is precisely why the safety dialogue needs to be grounded in science now, before it becomes entrenched in speculation.

In six months’ time, the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues will be presenting President Obama with its findings and recommendations on the implications of synthetic biology.  Hopefully as well as grappling with the ethics of nanotechnology, their recommendations will also address the potential and plausible risks associated with the technology, and the science that is needed to ensure its safe development and use.

Because without sound science guiding the safety dialogue, there is every chance that synthetic biology will be derailed by mistrust, misinformation and misunderstanding.

And if this happens, it’s hard to see how anyone can win.

A guest blog by Hilary Sutcliffe, Director of MATTER, a UK think tank which explores how new technologies can work for us all.

The other day, I wrote a piece on the implications of synthetic biology where I  suggested that we “need to place discussions on a science basis, and not get over-distracted by ethical hand-wringing.”  It was a bit of a provocative statement – intentionally so – so I was pleased to see Hilary Sutcliffe pick up on it in the comments and push back against the implication that the ethics of synbio might not be as important as some think.  Given the relevance of her comments, I thought they deserved their own guest blog – so here they are – AM.

“Ethical hand-wringing”?  Hmm, I don’t think you were quite meaning this as I have interpreted it Andrew, but I have to disagree with your point in your Synthetic Biology Blog on the ethical hand-wringing, I think we should be distracting ourselves quite a lot with Ethical Hand-Wringing while the scientists are getting on with creating their new organisms, especially considering ‘what we understand is secondary to what we can do’, as you said.

I was at the Royal Society’s Synthetic Biology Stakeholder meeting which was shown by BBC Newsnight last week, (my Mum and I spotted me fleetingly in the corner!) and this and other recent synbio events gave me many a déjà vu moment – had I accidentally gone to a nano meeting?

There are many similarities between the development of genetic modification (GM) and nanotechnologies which can be learned in the development of synthetic biology.  Time is of the essence – GM and nano were pretty much already in the shops when we started to take action, but here perhaps we can get our act together a bit sooner.

Here are quick observations on my déjà vu moments and lessons from nano and GM that may apply.  This is not an exhaustive list, just my quick on-the-hoof thoughts in response to the limited information I have:

• This is just an evolution of….. what’s all the fuss about? – ‘But it’s just an extension of GM’, ‘it’s just an extension of systems biology’, ‘it’s not actually anything really different’, ‘it’s an evolution of what we have been doing for years’.  Hello?!  Whether that is true or not from a scientific point of view, much like nano when you are close to it, that is not the point.  As the The Economist points out in its editorial this week, ‘…whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine spark, a vital essence’.  That has always been the line from nano scientists too, perhaps with even more validity. But to the lay person, or the sceptic, it looks dismissive and rather suspicious.  So though it is perhaps reasonable from a scientific point of view, I would suggest that synthetic biologists kill that ‘line of defence’, it won’t work and it never worked for nano either. Instead of calming fears, in fact it often has the opposite effect of raising further concern in the non-expert.

• ‘But first we need a definition’: Aaaahhhhh, nnnnoooooo!  Guess what, there is no definition, and I had a big déjà vu moment here – the conversation was IDENTICAL to the many I have had about nano over the years!  Standards makers, regulators, synbiologists, whoever – get this sorted. This has been a very divisive issue for nano – some say deliberately engineered – so pleeeeese address this question as soon as possible.  I may be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be a concerted international effort on this at the moment, there needs to be, now.  An idea – call up some of the nano people and find out how they did it (as slowly and tortuously as possible) and then do it differently!

• Governance – this does seem to be considered of real importance and there is work going on worldwide on this, though it appears in academia, rather than a concerted international effort – though I may be wrong. Five Academies – sister/brother orgs to the Royal Society – are meeting soon to discuss synbio, and this will be top of the list.  Obviously we need to do much better with this than we have on nano. The Venter Institute/MIT/CSIS prepared a interesting paper on Options for Governance; in the UK, Imperial/LSE/BIOS have a Center for Synthetic Biology and Innovation group which is doing some work sponsored by the Royal Society which looks interesting; and there are other experts in universities across the world doing their own work. But the BIG lesson for me from nano, which, with the potential for serious ‘bioerrors and bioterrors’, is even more important for synbio, is to get an international effort underway, ASAP, coordinated by a group such as the UN or OECD.  I have a vision of a UN/World Economic Forum/World Social Forum joint effort.  How unlikely is that, but perhaps worth a try?  Our Responsible Nano Code was the right document, but the wrong process.  Too British (despite the fact that all our businesses on the Working Group were multinational).  A very credible international process is very important here!

• ‘The current regulation is fit for purpose, we don’t need any more’.  This may actually be the case in this instance, but the time spent arguing about definitions with nano has slowed down the potential evaluation of the need for regulation and, some argue, given us some regulation which is not really fit for purpose. Again, an authoritative, multi-stakeholder process of regulatory evaluation needs to be underway now as part of the governance development process.

• Get business and science working together from the start.  In nano there were and still are parallel discussions going on with businesses and scientists in separate silos.  We really need to do things differently for synbio.  It is at the application end where the health, safety and environment impacts and social and ethical issues really hit, and business and science need both need to understand and participate in this.  If the governance area gets done by the Science Academies alone, this is unlikely to happen.  We need to find ways of making those connections with business early and making them stick.

• Ethical Hand-Wringing and public engagement. I have been encouraged by the calls on all sides for ethical debate, public engagement and what I think of as Ethical Hand-Wringing!  The ethical dilemmas in this are quite complicated, with vested interests on all sides and we need a serious commitment from governments, scientists and businesses to communicate clearly at all stages and engage all citizens in this discussion.  However, we do need more than the usual useful and interesting sets of focus groups reaching a few hundred people.  That is not really a debate on synthetic biology, it’s market research. Obviously synbioandme.org (yes I have bagged the domain) would be a start!  But I have come to the conclusion that we need to have mass communication and mass engagement if we are to allow citizens to understand and participate in this discussion.  This is tricky and we need to be much more innovative this time round.  And I don’t see much sign of that at the moment, though it is early days.  We made some inroads with nano, (fingers crossed for Nano&me being funded!) and the Dutch are doing a very interesting mass communication/engagement job on nano (check out the Nano Podium website).  Though of course as we are all broke, it won’t be happening anytime soon!

• But what do we want it for – where’s the overarching vision? A participant at the RS meeting made a very important point, which for me is the really big question.  We in the UK do these Big Important Inquiries (e.g. the recent Bioengineering report) where the government explores the potential for a technology with experts from the field in question and lo and behold, they say it is really important and should be given lots more funding! But where is the top level independent vision and strategy which explores the UK’s approach to its big issues – energy, health, poverty, the economy, for example – and looks at which technologies could be used to solve which problems?  Synbio, nano, GM, irradiation, IT, nano/bio/info/cogno may or may not be solutions to some of our most pressing problems, but unless applied research funding, economic incentives and commercial R&D is looked at in the context of other solutions, including non-technical ones, we can’t really be confident that we have got the right solutions to the right problems.   In addition, this is the very best time and place to anchor the Ethical Hand-Wringing, it would make public debate mean something, influential and galvanise everyone – from scientists to businesses, NGOs to governments – to engage better about the benefits of their work and debate real issues which will be relevant now and in the future.

Other countries do it – this must be an important priority for the new UK government. We have time with synthetic biology to get this right, we just need to get going now.

This piece also appears on the MATTER blog

Typical.  One of the most anticipated technological breakthroughs in years hits the streets, and I’m completely off the web – holed up in an Italian hotel with no internet and no phone.

I’m talking of course about J. Craig Venter’s team’s breakthrough in synthesizing a living organism, almost from scratch – published in the journal Science on Thursday and speculated on by everyone from Nobel laureates to Vatican officials since…

Having followed synthetic biology for some time, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the announcement that Venter has finally created a synthetic organism.  So I was more than a little frustrated to miss the first wave of commentaries on this week’s paper.  And coming late to the game, I now find that “Venter Fatigue” is already setting in – making writing a blog that someone wants to read all the harder.

But there are issues and ideas that I think are still worth exploring here.  So this is what I’m going to do:

For today, I thought I would recycle some stuff I wrote on what might be called “digital biology” last year – the potentially disruptive concept underlying synthetic biology that could well herald a new era of how we control the world we live in.  Then, when I’ve had a bit more time to marshal my thoughts, I’ll aim to write something about risks and ethics – and especially the need to place discussions on a science basis, and not get over-distracted by ethical hand-wringing.

But back to “digital biology.”  Last June, I wrote a piece about how our increasing control over matter at the nanoscale is transforming our ability to bend the world to our own ends.  This is what I said about advances in manipulating DNA:

“Thirty years ago, the notion of controlling the code of life itself would have been laughable.  Now it seems within reach.

Over the past few years, the ease with which genetic code can be sequenced has plummeted.  It took 13 years for teams of scientists around the globe to first read the human genome – completing the project in 2001.  In 2007, it took 2 months to sequence the genome of DNA-co-discoverer James Watson.  And by 2013 it is likely that your personal genome could be read in the time it takes to boil an egg.

Of course, sequencing just reads the information – it doesn’t tell you how to use it.  But here’s the important thing – sequencing genomes transforms the information from the physical domain to the digital domain, where it can be experimented with and engineered in new ways.  While restricted to the physical world, there were always going to be limitations to how effectively we manipulated and controlled genetic material.  In the digital domain, those limitations are gone.  Cheap affordable sequencing is ushering in the age of digital biology.

However, playing around with genetic information on computers would be little more than a novelty if it weren’t for one further advance – the plummeting cost of DNA synthesis.  This completes the loop between the physical and digital worlds.  Now, once you have uploaded your genome into the computer and digitally enhanced it, the technology exists – or soon will – to download the new genome back into reality.  It’s a technology that promises to enable an incredibly sophisticated level of genetic engineering.  It allows brand new genetic code to be written on the computer, tested out in virtual space, then downloaded back into an organism.  It even allows brand new organisms to be designed and created from scratch.

Synthetic biology - blurring the boundaries between the digital and physical domains

This possibility was pushed home last year when Craig Venter’s team synthesized the genome of a bacterium – Mycobacterium genitalium – from scratch.  The team has yet to insert the synthesized DNA into a cell, and thus achieve – in effect – the creation of life from laboratory chemicals.  But it seems only a matter of time before this is achieved.

We’re not quite there yet with the technology that will allow us to manipulate biology at the nanoscale.  But it’s coming.  And when it does, the level of control we have had over matter for the past ten centuries will seem like child’s play.”

This last week’s announcement takes the idea of designing living systems in the digital domain – then reading them back into reality – to the next level.  Okay so you can split hairs and say that Venter and his crew didn’t technically synthesize life – they needed a few existing components (the machinery of the cell) to start with.  But it really is splitting hairs, because the synthetic genome included the code that allowed this machinery to be constructed from scratch in subsequent generations of the organism.  The breakthrough here was the ability to write the complete code for an organism on a computer, then translate it into a real, living, replicating life form.

Of course, there’s a ton of science that we don’t understand here – and given the enormous complexity of living organisms, it will be a long time before we come close to coming close to being able to design a completely new organism from scratch that does what we intend it to do.  But that’s not the point here.  What we are seeing is the beginning of a new technology, where what we understand is secondary to what we can do.

We may be a long way from perfectly designed organisms.  But technology isn’t about perfection – it’s about doing something practical to achieve a tangible result. And to do that, you don’t always need to know why things work; just that they do work.

Without a doubt, this week’s announcement marks the dawn of a new technology – a technology that blurs the boundaries between the digital domain and living organisms. The state of the science may still be lacking.  But then how often has a new technology been preceded by a mature science? Usually the technology and the science progress in tandem, and it’s not unusual for the technology to lead the science.

Add to this the incredible progress that has been made in engineering complex systems over the past 100 years – leading to technologies where the whole is greater than the contribution of any individual or team working on it – and the stage is set for Venter’s team’s achievements to profoundly influence how we interact with the living world.

The question is, are we up to handling it?

Note: apologies for an appallingly cliched title, although I was surprised no-one else has used it yet.  Guess that’s what jetlag and internet deprivation do for you!

A guest blog by Barbara Herr Harthorn, Director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California Santa Barbara.

A couple of weeks back, my colleague David Guston wrote here about engaging the public on nanotechnology.   In his piece he gave an excellent overview of the US government’s activities – or relative lack of them – on public engagement in this area.  But I also felt that some questions on why we should encourage public participation in nanotechnology in the first place – and how the government should think about approaching this – were left unanswered.  So to continue where David left off, I would like to explore these questions a little further.

To start with, why do public deliberation on nanotechnology?  The simplest answers are because it’s the right thing to do, and because it’s a useful thing to do.

Let’s take those one at a time:

Public participation is the right thing to do

Public participation in nanotechnology is the right thing to do because it’s a legal mandate – incorporation of some element of public participation is a required element of the Congressional authorization for the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). It also enables citizens to participate more fully in the democratic process.

The normative view is that within a democracy it is right and proper to have all affected parties involved in decisions that may affect them (Fiorino 1989). Such democratic values may indeed compete with technocratic values, but the “participatory turn” (Whitmarsh 2009) with its resultant legal basis for participation is now an established fact in many countries.

If you accept that potentially affected publics have a right to know, at least about risks, the issue of how to gain their ‘informed consent’ to those risks is a complex ethical matter because nanotechnology involves an entire class of technologies that span almost all industries, and the potentially affected include most of society. Public deliberation is one method for achieving informed consent in this upstream context, although a comprehensive public deliberation effort in the US would necessarily be extensive in scope given the potential ubiquity of distribution of nano materials, products, and waste.

Both Centers for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) established by the National Science Foundation – David’s at Arizona State University (ASU) and the one I direct at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) – have engaged in public deliberation exercises.  But efforts to date have been on a small scale—they’ve necessarily included a very limited number of participants, and have focused only on a limited subset of the spectrum of applications (CNS-UCSB’s 10 public deliberation workshops in 2007 and 2009 focused on nanotech energy/environment applications or health/enhancement applications; CNS-ASU’s 6 workshops in 2007 looked exclusively at human enhancement technologies). On-line deliberation and the linking of selective face-to-face deliberation results with comprehensive survey data for validating opinions and views in national samples offer some potential methods for future larger scale nano deliberations, as long as diverse publics are included. We are pursuing both strategies on a pilot basis at CNS-UCSB.

In terms of public participation in the NNI, fulfillment of the normative purpose would mean allocating sufficient resources to conduct a meaningful public deliberation effort that is iterative and involves both lay persons and scientists.  Even though this might take some resources away from technological R&D in the short term, this would be in the interest of creating “socially sustainable technologies” (i.e., development of nanotechnologies that will be good for society in the long term).

Public deliberation is a useful thing to do

In addition to the normative reasons cited above, public participation is potentially useful for both instrumental and substantive purposes (Fiorino 1989). Instrumental here means that public participation contributes to other goals – for example, building community support for local development; or creating a basis of trust that will sustain support in the event of risk events.  Substantive contributions refer to the actual knowledge and learning that can take place through deliberative processes, particularly the contribution of local knowledge to successful outcomes – for example, better understanding of more useful applications of multi-purpose devices.

There are two foundational resources that have laid the groundwork for the current state of knowledge about this, both of them publications based on National Research Council panels:

Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society (Stern and Fineberg 1996) made the case for how making risks understandable to the public and avoiding risk controversies and conflict involve far more than just translating scientific knowledge (e.g. risk assessment). In it, they set out the main framework for “analytic-deliberative” decision making as a process that includes both analysis and public deliberation, brings lay and scientific experts together in an iterative process that promotes co-learning not just for particular decisions, and, when done well, can lead to better outcomes in terms of a number of important criteria.

Much more recently, in Dec 2008 Dietz and Stern’s National Research Council volume Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making, reported on a panel specifically convened to address questions of whether public participation in environmental decision making was beneficial to the process and outcomes or if, as some detractors have argued, involving lay people in complex technical decision making slowed or even derailed the process. They concluded that when conducted properly, public participation as a part of government or private sector organizations for assessment, planning and decision making (i.e., not political participation for voting or forming interest groups) contributes to the quality, legitimacy and capacity of decision making.

Getting back to nanotechnology, the NNI has not yet specified the form that public participation should take.

Key aspects of successful public participation and deliberation have been shown to include:

• “early and often” (meaning that you need to begin the process early in development and continue interaction often);
• procedural fairness (even if publics don’t agree with agencies, if they feel they’ve been treated openly, respectfully and fairly, this leads to demonstrably better outcomes, such as less litigation) (Chess and Purcell 1999);
• well managed process, including a clear purpose, adequate resources, genuine commitment of participants to the process, timely outputs, and a focus on learning; and
• implementation that includes breadth of participants, intensity of interaction (particularly face-to-face), and integration of scientific expertise (Dietz & Stern 2008).

Thus, in addition to the political will to include participation as an element of the NNI, there is considerable basis for asserting that public participation in nanotech R&D can be beneficial to the quality, legitimacy and capacity of the NNI. Public participation in nanotechnology development that:

1. addresses needs and concerns of publics (and publics for this purpose would include businesses, NGOs, and communities, as well as individuals),
2. reduces mistrust between stakeholders (e.g., academic or industry labs and surrounding communities), and
3. results in all participants (including scientists) being better informed about the issues and about one another, and produces meta-learning about participatory processes

would be a highly successful outcome for the NNI. On the other hand, one enduring and detrimental feature of public participation efforts has been the “reluctance of government to grant influence to participatory efforts,” and another common cause of poor public participation outcomes is when participation is aimed at “boosterism” for an agency or program (Chess and Purcell 1999).

Clearly, public deliberation in the NNI, if it is to be effective, needs to take heed of these hard-won lessons, and knowledgeable researchers will be reluctant to take part in an effort that is likely to fail for such predictable reasons.

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References

Chess, Caron and Kristen Purcell. 1999. Public participation and the environment: Do we know what works? Env Sci & Tech 33(16): 2685-2692.

Dietz, Thomas and Paul C. Stern, Eds. 2008. Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making, Panel on Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making, National Research Council. Washington: National Academies Press.

Fiorino, Daniel. 1989. Environmental risks and democratic process: A critical review. Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 14:501-547.

Stern, Paul D. & Harvey V. Fineberg, Eds. 1996. Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society. Committee on Risk Characterization, commission on Behavioral and social Sciences and Education. National Research Council. Washington: National Academies Press.

Whitmarsh, Lorraine. 2009. Review of Dietz and Stern, Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making. Environmental Science & Policy 12:1069-1072.

Does the US need more public participation in assessing technologies and their potential impact on society, and informing decisions on their development and use?  Richard Sclove – author of a new report on technology assessment – thinks yes; but only as part of a new paradigm for technology assessment.  The report, published today by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Science & Technology Innovation Program, announces plans for a new Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology Network (ECAST), which would compliment expert input with participatory technology assessment to help inform decisions on developing new and emerging technologies.

I’m currently reading Robert Winston’s new book “Bad Ideas? An arresting history of our inventions” (slowly, as regular followers of 2020 Science will realize!).  Starting from the earliest indications of innovation amongst humans – from tool-making and the development of language – and ending up at the present day, he takes a hard look at what innovation has cost us over the ages, as well as what we have gained from it.  Reading it, one can’t help ask the question (as I suspect the author intended) – are we slaves to innovation, or can we control the process?

Technology Assessment in all its guises is a rejection of the former, and an attempt to embrace the latter.  It is based on the assumption that, if only we can get some insight into where a particular technology innovation is going and what the broader social and economic consequences might be, we should be able to tweak the system to increase the benefits and decrease the downsides.

As an idea, it’s an attractive one.  Having the foresight to identify potential hurdles to progress ahead of time and make decisions that help overcome them at an early stage makes sound sense.  If businesses wants to develop products that are sustainable over long periods, governments want to craft policies that have long-reaching positive consequences and citizens want to support actions that will benefit them and  their children, any intelligence on the potential benefits and pitfalls associated with a new technology is invaluable to informed decision-making.

The trouble is, making sense of a complex future where technology, social issues, politics, economics and sheer human irrationality collide, is anything but straight forward.

Back in 1972, the US Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to handle exactly this type of challenge.  For 23 years , OTA took a relatively formal and meticulous approach to assessing emerging technologies for Congress, based on expert input and analysis.  When the Office was closed in 1995, many considered it a blow to informed policy on science and technology within the US.  Ironically, as the US (along with the rest of the world) now squares up to some of the most complex science and technology-based issues and opportunities ever to face humanity, the tools that might help inform forward-looking decisions on how to navigate this technology-driven future are rather conspicuously lacking.

Into this void comes today’s report from Dr. Richard Sclove – founder and senior Fellow of the Loka Institute.  Sclove argues that we need to take a proactive role in determining the trajectory of technology for the good of society, but that a changing world demands new approaches – the OTA of 1972 (he suggests) would look conspicuously out of place in today’s fast pace, interconnected world.  Specifically, he argues that citizens need a place at the table – not instead of experts, but as a valuable voice alongside those of others in evaluating how technology-driven futures might most appropriately evolve.

Richard makes a strong case for what he terms participatory Technology Assessment – or pTA.  He argues that in a democracy, citizens should have the right to help decide how technology is developed and used; that citizens bring a range of social values to the table which are critical to determining technology trajectories and can help select potentially more sustainable ways forward; that engaging a broad base of people expands the knowledge base on which decisions are made; that citizen involvement can improve the effectiveness of decisions that are made, and help avoid costly mis-steps; and that pTA can even lead to expedited conclusions (although I am still struggling to see how asking more people for their perspectives and input can lead to a faster process).

The challenge is, how to make this work – and work in a way where citizens are fully engaged in the process of decision making, rather than just being a token presence.

Sclove quickly dismisses the option of re-instating the OTA (or a similar institutionalized body) as being outdated, unlikely to embrace pTA (the OTA did not engage citizens in technology assessment generally), and too focused on serving institutions within government rather than society as a whole.   He also challenges the suggestion that sufficient technology assessment is already carried out by a range of government offices, including the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

Instead, an alternative is offered – an independent network of institutions that work together to carry out a combination of expert and participatory technology assessment.

The result is ECAST – the Expert & Citizen Assessment of Science & Technology Network; a proposed independent network of organizations that can facilitate and conduct technology assessments that are not only responsive to 21st century challenges, but also make full use of 21st century opportunities.

As presented in the report, ECAST is in the initial stages of formation, supported by the Woodrow Wilson  International Center for Scholars, the Boston Museum of Science, the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, Science CheerLeader, and The Loka Institute.  However, there are clearly plans to expand this network.

The model as it stands is based on working through science museums (as a direct link to citizens), universities (bringing innovative ideas and research and analysis capabilities to the table) and non-partisan policy research organizations (providing policy relevance, and interfacing with decision makers).  While at an early stage of development, it clearly draws on the ideas of independence, input from experts and laypersons, and strong connections to policymakers (the report stresses the need for a physical presence in Washington DC).

Does the idea have legs?  I’m not sure yet, although I would be the first to agree that movement along these lines is desperately needed if the US is to develop strategic and sustainable technology innovation policies.  Looking to the future, it’s hard to justify letting innovation run its course without any form of intervention – if the recent economic crisis has taught us anything, it’s that.  As advances in science and technology, global communications and coupling between humanity and the environment in which we live continue to converge together, there is a social and economic imperative to help ensure technology innovation leads to long-term progress.  And assuming that everything will fall out in the wash without proactive intervention is both naive and short sighted.  The only real question is how to go about controlling the future.

I would argue strongly that, as stakeholders in the future, citizens have a right and a responsibility to be a part the process.  Richard’s proposal is definitely a significant move in this direction.  It’s not perfect – I have questions over the legitimacy of the process, sources of funding, the ability of the proposed network to make a difference, and translating academic ideals into practical reality.  Nevertheless, it’s an exciting and innovative step forward, and one that I will be following with interest.

I don’t particularly like the thought that we are slaves to innovation – I may be overly optimistic, but I would like to believe that humanity has the ability to choose future courses that are more likely to improve people’s lives.  But as our “inventions” get increasingly more sophisticated, it’s going to take more than luck and good intentions to ensure that what looks good on paper doesn’t turn out to be yet another “bad idea.” Hopefully, innovations like ECAST will help empower people to work together towards a future in which technology innovation is more likely to solve problems, than create new ones.

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I feel I should add a disclaimer to this post, as Richard Sclove’s report was published by an organization I was a part of until recently – the Science & Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.  However, I was not in any way associated with the development and writing of the report, and indeed the first time I saw it was earlier today when it was publicly released.

I owe my nearly-thirteen year old son – big-time!  This time next week he will be the proud recipient of an iPad – part birthday present, part relocation “compensation” and part his own personal investment.  But in the meantime, I’m here at 30,000 feet, typing on his intended device – being a kind soul, he graciously allowed me to give it a test run!

Reading all the publicity and chat surrounding the iPad, I’ve been intrigued by it’s potential as a work-aid.  Forget the fancy games, the videos and the photos – I wanted to see if it could make my reluctant road warrior-scientist existence just that little bit easier.

So taking advantage of a short trip to Minneapolis, a shiny new iPad in the closet just begging to be used, and my son’s generosity (I asked first!), I’ve been putting Apple’s latest gizmo through it’s paces.

As I write this, I am coming to the end of 48 hours on the road with the iPad.  In bringing the device with me on this trip, I had a pretty specific aim in mind – to explore how effectively it could replace my laptop while traveling, and whether it would make my life easier.  In other words, is it just an expensive solution looking for a problem, or does it truly have the potential to ease my workflow while on the road?

Out of the box. From the get-go, setting the iPad up was simplicity itself.  First, the packaging is inspired – open the box and all you have is the iPad, a power supply and a USB cable.  This device is designed to be intuitive – you are immediately invited to just switch it on and follow the instructions.  Syncing with iTunes on my laptop and loading up the new apps was a breeze – within a matter of minutes I was ready to rock and roll.

But how did the apps themselves fare?

Editing a Keynote presentation on the iPad

Talking the talk. What most excited me about the iPad was the possibility of using it to give presentations, without having to lug my laptop around with me.  I give a lot of talks, and some years ago I standardized on Apple Keynote as my presentation platform of choice.  So I was more than a little excited by the prospect of using the iPad version of this app.  Scheduled to give a keynote talk at an event on Thursday morning, this was my chance!

There’s been a lot written already about the iPad version of Keynote, and not all of it positive.  Although presentations on the app can look stunning, it isn’t directly compatible with the desktop version of Keynote – custom fonts don’t transfer; there are a limited range of templates available; presenter notes aren’t supported; and the app has a nasty habit of messing up presentations that are transferred back and forth between the iPad and a desktop computer.

Armed with this intelligence, I transferred a  copy of my presentation to the iPad before heading off to the airport, and spent half the flight between DC and Minneapolis tweaking the iPad version.

As it turned out, this wasn’t too hard a task – helped no doubt by the rather minimalist slide design I use.  It took a little time to get to grips with the Keynote iPad app limitations – not being able to group elements on a slide was a bit of a killer for instance – but within an hour I had a slick looking presentation all set to go.

Come Thursday, the actual presentation went seamlessly.  Plugging the iPad into the projector using Apple’s VGA connector and hitting “play” brought up the presentation on the screen immediately, and controlling the flow of slides was simple from the iPad’s screen.  I was impressed – I was able to give a slick, professional looking presentation from a slab of glass and aluminum a fraction of the bulk of my usual laptop.  And it all went without a hitch.

Keynote on the iPad is far from perfect.  But it’s good enough that, if you approach presentations from the perspective of designing them for the device, it works well.  I actually suspect that the simplicity of Keynote on the iPad has the potential to help people design better presentations, precisely because it’s limitations force you to think more about content and delivery.  And I must confess, slideshows on iPad itself can look stunning using the the features that are available.

For me, the’s no question that I would happily use this app in place of my laptop.  For others, Apple will probably need to work on features like handling groups and showing presenters notes (which it is incapable of handling at present) before it’s ready for prime time.

Viewing a publication in Papers on the iPad

The paperless office. I’ve long had fantasies of a portable device that gives me easy access to PDF files while on the go – meeting documents, reports, scientific papers and the like.  When electronic books came into vogue a few years back I had high hopes that I could ditch the stack of papers I constantly seem to cart around with me and transfer them to an ebook.  No such luck – although I gather the Kindle DX is better than most e-books in handling PDF’s, my experiences with other e-books were not happy ones.  So I was particularly interested in how the iPad would fare in this respect.

Before setting off, I loaded up two very different apps for working with PDF files: PDF Reader HD for viewing PDF files, and Papers – an app that allows you to carry a searchable library of academic papers around on the iPad, and sync them with your main computer.

Both apps displayed documents in what I can only describe as stunning detail.  It’s hard to over-emphasize how good these files looked on the iPad – the closest thing in my experience to date to having the original paper copy in my hand, but with the advantages of being able to search and scan the documents in ways impossible with hard copies.  I loved being able to magnify plots in papers and inspect them in depth, all with a flick of my fingers.  This feature alone made the iPad experience richer than accessing the papers on my laptop or as printed documents.

The Papers app allows documents to be synced between the iPad and a computer running the desktop version of the program.  The system worked smoothly – my only gripe being that you are limited to having 1000 papers on the iPad.

Transferring files to PDF Reader HD is a little more convoluted – you either need to use the iTunes interface, or transfer files via an internet browser over a wireless network.  The system works, but it’s messy.  Nevertheless, it was relatively easy to transfer a suite of useful files to the iPad so that I had them at my fingertips.

Taking note. I’ve recently started using EverNote to take and sync notes between my laptop and my iPhone.  The basic service – which is free – stores indexable notes in the ‘cloud,’ allowing access to them from wherever you are – a great idea for jotting down ideas and keeping track of thoughts while on the go.  EverNote for the iPad extends the number of devices these notes can be written and accessed on.

Despite the occasional crash, I found EverNote a useful tool on the iPad.  In the meetings I was in I could quickly jot down notes, and retrieve them later from whichever device I had access to – whether it was the iPad, iPhone or laptop.  What I particularly liked was how easy it was to break out the iPad and type something in – faster than getting the laptop out, and easier than typing on my iPhone.  In fact, I have found typing on the iPad in landscape mode as fast, and nearly as easy, as typing on my laptop.  I suspect it’s because I am a rather sad two-finger typer (a friend who is a touch typist was completely flummoxed by the iPad keyboard), but I had no problems with the virtually keyboard.

The free version of EverNote only allows access to notes when on line – there’s an annual charge for accessing notes off-line.  As it isn’t always possible to access a Wi-Fi internet connection with the current iPad, this is a potential issue.  But overall,I found EverNote on the iPad a great way to keep track of thoughts ideas and the occasional important piece of information that came my way.

Checking email on the iPad

Keeping in touch. Email was great on the iPad.  It took just a few minutes to establish access to my Mobile Me account and my University Exchange account, both of which allowed access to my email, calendar and contacts from the iPad.  Working with the built in email client was simple but effective – very similar to using the iPhone, but on a big screen!

My calendar on the iPad using the built in app was gorgeous!  Not only was it easy to flick through, add and edit appointments, but the slick presentation made working with my schedule extremely easy.  In terms of an organizer, I would rank using the iPad far above the iPhone or my laptop.  This is the digital calendar I’ve been waiting for all my life – I just didn’t know it until now!

The iPad’s address book was similarly slick, but didn’t quite have the wow appeal of the calendar. It was simple and effective though, and again much easier to access than having to pull my laptop out and power it up.

What I particularly appreciated with the calendar and address book applications was the ability to sync with various sources.  As I sit here typing, I can access my Exchange and Mobile Me calendars, as well as a separate set of appointments and contact that are synced with my laptop.  It makes working with my information in the way I want to surprisingly easy.

Getting organized with Things on the iPad

Getting organized. I use Things from Cultured Code on my iPhone to keep track of the myriad tasks I need to keep track of – it’s a beautifully simple application that works well with my less than organized approach to life, rather than forcing me to adopt a restrictively awkward work patten.  Initially I was hesitant to load the iPad version of Things up because of the cost – it will set you back close to $20.  Fortunately, the kind folks at Cultured Code allowed me access to an evaluation copy for the purpose of this review.

Things on the iPad works extremely well.  It has the same functionality as the iPhone version, but with the larger screen it is transformed into a far more productive tool.  And compared to the desktop version of the application, i found having my to-do list at my fingertips while on the go invaluable.

When on the same Wi-Fi network as a desktop version of Things, the application will sync information seamlessly between the iPad and the computer.  I had no problem syncing Things between my laptop, iPad and iPhone in this way – no matter where I was or what I was using, I knew what I was supposed to be doing.

The bottom line. Overall, this has been a great experience with the iPad.  I’ve loved the immediacy and accessibility of the device – it’s placed information and tools at my fingertips that have helped me work faster and more efficiently, and all with a minimally short learning curve.

Don’t get me wrong, the iPad is far from perfect – there are things it doesn’t do that a PC does.  But the way I have been using it, I think that some of the downsides that have been discussed on line over the past couple of weeks aren’t as relevant to me as they perhaps are to others.  The iPad i’ve been using hasn’t got over-hot during use.  I haven’t had problems connecting to the internet.  The lack of multitasking hasn’t been a serious issue.  I haven’t been stymied by a lack of Flash when accessing the web.  And typing has been straight forward on the virtual keyboard – the first draft of this piece was typed in Pages on the the iPad with no trouble at all.

That said, the iPad clearly is not a laptop replacement.  For example, I had hoped to be able to post this blog direct from the iPad, but difficulties using WordPress from the device would have meant posting the piece without formatting, hot links or images.  And the file handling is rather crude and limited.  But as an extension to a laptop and a means to making life on the road less stressful and more productive, the device is a wonder.  Think of it as a smart digital briefcase that you can pack your important files into when you hit the road, and that connects you to your digital world when your laptop is just too cumbersome and your smart phone just too small.

So, after 48 hours, what’s the verdict?  Is the iPad essential?  No. Does it make life easier?  Without a doubt.  Is it a worthwhile productivity tool for the itinerant scientist?  Absolutely.  Do I want one?  What do you think?!

In other words, I’m sold on the thing.  The only challenge now is how to scrape the dosh together to buy my own after this one has been returned to it’s rightful owner!  On the other hand, I wonder if he would miss it…

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Endnotes. Someone mentioned in passing that you can also play games, listen to music and watch videos on the iPad.  Honestly though, who would want to indulge in such frippery when you have such a great set of productivity tools at your fingertips…

Actually, I would have loved to have spent time within the wider world of iPhone apps, but time and schedule didn’t allow on this occasion – and I was supposed to be evaluating it as a business tool.  But I can say – from my limited experience – that photos on the iPad are stunning, video works exceedingly well, and web-browsing was as smooth as any experience I have had (assuming I wasn’t trying to view Flash-based sites).  Even the built-in speaker is adequate.

I was also fascinated by the increasing range of useful apps, as opposed to entertainment apps.  I only had time to load up and play with a simple calculator app and Wolfram Alpha – both were impressive though.  Wolfram Alpha in particular looks like it’s worth exploring in depth on this platform – the app takes full advantage of the format, and provides a portal to a vast information resource.  I can see this taking of as a serious platform for science  and education apps.

From this very brief encounter, the real bottom line is that this is a highly innovative and intuitive device that I can see becoming increasingly useful in the future to scientists and other professionals, whether on the road or not.

Screenshot of Wolfram Alpha on the iPad - an app that begs to be explored more!

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) plans to form a new interagency group on emerging technologies, including nanotechnology and synthetic biology.  The announcement was make by Tom Kalil, deputy director for policy at OSTP, at a government-organized workshop on Risk Management Methods and Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications of Nanotechnology held last week.  The AAAS policy alert (not available on the web yet available here) noted that the group is intended to provide research funding agencies and regulatory agencies an opportunity to discuss emerging policy issues.

Unfortunately I wasn’t at the workshop in Washington DC where Kalil made his remarks, and so don’t know any more about this than was included in the brief note from AAAS.  However, from what was reported, this seems a sensible move – if carried through thoughtfully.

Nanotechnology – arguably the US government’s flagship emerging technology – has highlighted the need for smart policy decisions when developing new technologies.  What started as a science-based initiative to promote new research, stimulate innovation and create new jobs, has increasingly become entangled in the social, political and economic impacts of science and technology promotion.  Ten years after President Clinton established the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) – the initiative that coordinates nanotechnology activities across federal agencies – there remains an uneasy relationship between the desire to drive science discovery and technology innovation, and the need to understand and manage the potential safety, societal and economic impacts of this push.

At the heart of this uneasy relationship is a built-in resistance to asking “un-askable” questions.

The NNI’s vision is “a future in which the ability to understand and control matter at the nanoscale leads to a revolution in technology and industry that benefits society.” The vision is built on a belief that increasing our ability to control matter at the nanoscale is essential, that this will lead to a technology revolution, and that this revolution will benefit society. This is a powerful driver, and has contributed largely to the success of the NNI specifically and nanotechnology more broadly.  But it does mean that people who ask difficult questions tend to be tarred by a brush that’s reserved for whistle blowers and inconvenient activists.

This has been seen in the slow and sometimes reluctant inclusion of research into potential health and environmental impacts under the NNI umbrella; a resistance to developing government-wide policies on developing nanotechnology responsibly (a resistance usually justified by the NNI being a science initiative, not a policy initiative); and negligible efforts to include citizens who stand to gain or loose from nanotechnology as partners in the process (see David Guston’s piece on this for instance).  There has also been a surprising lack of analysis of the broader economic impacts of nanotechnology promotion – as opposed to the economic benefits.  How many companies and economies have invested in nanotechnology simply because the US set an aggressive lead – and what has been the economic impact of this “follow the leader” mentality?

The reality is that in any initiative dedicated to promoting a given technology, people and organizations that raise issues and recommend actions that threaten to undermine this promotion risk being marginalized.  And this ends up playing into personal and agency self-interest – why give up a position of influence and the promise of funding for the sake of asking difficult questions? I can only imagine what the response to a NNI member who suggested the usefulness of the initiative should be re-examined would be – I suspect it would not be pretty!  Yet if sound and strategic policies are to be developed that benefit citizens, the “un-askable” questions are often the most important ones.

Looking forward, there is a need to develop emerging technology-related policies that are balanced by considerations other than technology promotion. alone  But on top of this, there is a need to develop more holistic approaches to emerging technologies in general.  Nanotechnology is not the only new technology on the block – technologies emerging under the banners of synthetic biology,  robotics, geoengineering, cognitive enhancement and a plethora of others are coming up fast.  Then there are the gray areas between these where convergence leads to increasingly complex and ill-defined technologies.  In the face of accelerating innovation, should policies be developed for each and every new technology that comes along?  This would be exceedingly difficult to achieve now, and an impossible task I suspect a few years down the line.

One solution – and the one the White House seems to be pursuing – is to take a high-level approach to emerging technology policy that ensures cross-agency coordination, identifies emerging hot-spots and enables a balanced and socially-responsible approach to emerging opportunities and issues.  In some ways this is a role that the long-defunct Office of Technology Assessment within the US Congress played.  But looking to an increasingly technologically-complex future, I suspect that a complete rethink of how to ensure the benefits of new technologies are realized and the dangers avoided is needed.

Depending on how it develops, the new White House interagency group could well lead to coordinated action on emerging technologies that ensures policies are responsive to the needs of citizens – not just those who have a vested interest in technology promotion.  But I can guarantee it will hit resistance from agencies, organizations and individuals who stand to loose out from this move – including those who stand to loose funding or influence as a result. of it  Yet if the US government is to embrace technology development that benefits society as a whole – especially in light of President Obama’s Innovation Strategy – it surely must create a policy forum where the “un-askable” questions can be asked; where no one interest group within the government can dominate proceedings; and where hurdles to social and economic prosperity can be identified, assessed and addressed without fear of agencies and individuals being marginalized.

Done right, this could be a critical step toward the US developing a 21st century approach to 21st century technologies.

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In order to ensure the new group’s effectiveness, OSTP are going to have to grapple with some tough issues.  These will include, amongst others:

Links to technology-specific initiatives. I would imagine that the new group will function best as  a complementary activity to initiatives such as the NNI.  There is clearly benefit to having strong technology-promotion initiatives like the NNI, and it would seem foolish to diminish these.  And initiatives like this are essential for intelligence on where emerging technologies are going.  Yet at the same time it is important that policy decisions are decoupled somewhat from technology promotion.  One way to do this is to ensure strong links between initiatives such as the NNI and the new group.

Agency-engagement at a senior level. To avoid yet another talking-shop, the new group will need to engage agencies at a senior level – ensuring that participants have decision-making authority.

Balance of interest. To the extent that it is possible across federal agencies, the group is more likely to be effective if there is balance between different interests – including science, business, economic growth, social development and prosperity, and oversight.

Funding. One fear of establishing a group like this is that it will undermine efforts to fund oversight and social impacts-related research through initiatives such as the NNI.  This is a serious concern, although it would be dangerous to place research funding interests within specific sectors ahead of sound policy formulation.  Nevertheless, it would be prudent to both ensure the new group does not adversely impact on current funding into the challenges and potential impacts of emerging technologies, and to develop mechanisms to support and stimulate new funding to address strategically important issues.

Stakeholder input. It is hard to imagine how the planned interagency group will function effectively without non-government stakeholder input.  In the absence of balanced input from different stakeholder groups – representatives of business, citizens and academia in particular – cross-government policies on emerging technologies are unlikely to be relevant, responsive or effective.  This will almost definitely mean setting up a Federal Advisory Committee to the group  to ensure informed and representative input.

To coincide with my move to the University of Michigan, Seed Magazine has just published a series of ten questions and answers on what I do and what motivates me as a scientist.  You can read how well I fared (or didn’t, as the case may be) with questions as diverse as “How do you explain your job at cocktail parties?” to “Why do you do science?” on the Seed Magazine website.

I was surprised to hear that Seed sometimes have to hard-sell the idea of this series to scientists – who doesn’t want to pontificate about what they are reading, or who they would most like to meet?  But I must confess, answering questions like “Why do you do science?” and “What inspires you?” was tougher than I imagined.

Previous articles in Seed’s “10 Questions” series include:

• James Kasting on the odds of finding another earth-like planet and the power of science fiction;
• Kirsten Bomblies on the immune system of plants and how young scientists can keep inspiration alive;
• John Rinn onwhy we should dumpster-dive in our genomes and the inspiration of a middle-distance runner; and
• Amy Cannon on low-energy solar cells, training scientists to weed out toxicity, and what makes benign chemistry such a good business proposition.

]]> http://2020science.org/2010/04/06/cultivating-ingenuity-humility-in-an-increasingly-complex-world/feed/ 1 http://2020science.org/2010/03/22/sex-sexuality-and-science-a-novices-guide/ http://2020science.org/2010/03/22/sex-sexuality-and-science-a-novices-guide/#comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:13:22 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=2977

A year or so ago, there was a challenge circling round the blogging community to write on a subject you know nothing about.  It’s a little late, but I think this blog quite possibly qualifies as my contribution.

Earlier this year I rather foolishly agreed to rise to a challenge set me on the 2020 Science Facebook page by Jasmine Andrews: Write a blog about science and sexuality.

Now I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that I know nothing about sex.  But lets be honest here: When it comes to the finer points of sex and sexuality, I’m male, I’ve lived a sheltered life, and I’m a scientist! Actually, I don’t think the first and last points count, but you get the idea.

Nevertheless, a promise is a promise, so without further ado, here is the first (and quite possibly the last) 2020 Science blog on sex, sexuality and science.

Approaching this blog, I was immediately faced with a dilemma – not only is this an area well outside my expertise (not to mention, comfort zone), but the links between science and sexuality are convoluted and complex to say the least.  It’s not that there is a lack of material – a quick Google search on “Science” and “Sexuality” throws up literally millions of links, including one to The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.  But a cursory glance suggests this “literature” is dominated by the science of sexuality rather than how science impacts on sexuality.

It’s this second question that intrigues me.  There’s been a lot of research carried out into the biology, physiology and psychology of sex and sexuality, and this has led to a greater understanding of us as individuals as well as us as a society. It has also led to some rather ill-informed – barbaric even – actions in the past, as people have tried to use science to justify suppressing or otherwise controlling sexuality. But how about the secondary impacts of science and technology on sexuality?  Have advances in scientific knowledge and technology innovation changed more generally our perceptions and realizations of ourselves as sexual beings?

I’m sure this has been written about extensively somewhere.  But in the spirit of the challenge set me, I thought I would try and think through this question for myself.

Being quite literally a novice here, I thought I would start by trying to conceptualize – from my limited understanding – how sexuality, sex, society and science might relate to each other.  This is what I ended up with:

A rather simple representation of how sex, sexuality and science might be related

What intrigued me in sketching out this “model” was what affects the dynamic between sex and sexuality – both for individuals and within social groups.  The result is more a model of my own thought processes – so no guarantees that it is either accurate or meaningful.  But it did help me begin to tease out how advances in science and technology might impact on sex and sexuality.

The model is built around four core subjects: Sex – the physical interaction between two people (and no, I’m not going to define what does or doesn’t constitute “sex”); sexuality – how people experience and express themselves as sexual beings; the individual person; and the social group they are a part of.

The dynamic between these four subjects is complex, and is influenced by a number of inter-related drivers.  In this model I included four drivers that seemed to make sense in terms of the four subjects, but I’m sure there are others:

• Procreation is fairly self-explanatory: passing on genetic material to the next generation (or, in the vernacular, “making babies”).
• Bonding refers to the emotional as well as physical bonds that are created and reinforced through sex.
• Control reflects how sex is used to establish, define and enforce relationships between people and within social groups – either subtly or overtly.  And
• Fulfillment is a bit of a ragbag of emotional, psychological and physiological drivers associated with, amongst other things, pleasure, contentment, comfort, security and release.

Surrounding the subjects and drivers are three influencing factors: society, religion and science.  Society and religion are two obvious factors – each having a well-established if not necessarily well-understood influence on sex and sexuality.  The third – science, – represents how advances in science understanding and  technology innovation potentially influence sex and sexuality.

The model laid out above sets the scene for exploring how science might impact on sexuality.  But to be useful, it needs to be flexed a little.

By weighting the influencing factors and drivers by their relative significance within society, the resulting impact on the four subjects might be explored.  Looking back to a hypothetical science-poor society for instance, the model might look something like this:

Exploring social-sexual dynamics in a science-poor society

Here we have a scenario where the influence of society and religion – through social and religious norms and expectations – exert far greater influence than science on the subjects and drivers within the model.  Assuming that society and religion emphasize social stability and sustainability, their influence over the drivers can be represented by larger or smaller circles of effect.  In this case the procreation driver is heavily emphasized (sustainability), while the fulfillment driver is de-emphasized (of secondary importance to procreation and social stability).  Bonding is emphasized where it strengthens social cohesion, and control is kept in check, ensuring that a social hierarchy is maintained, but not over-strained.

The result is a depiction of a society that is focused on the good of the group and sex as an act, rather than the individual and sexuality.

OK so it’s just a naive and crude model.  But nevertheless this particular assessment does lead to a picture that resonates with how sex and sexuality have been positioned within some societies in the past.

So having checked that the model makes some sort of sense, what happens if we ramp up the influence of science?  We might get something like this:

Exploring social-sexual dynamics in a science-rich society

Here, the influence of society and religion have been decreased and science’s influence increased, reflecting a situation similar to the modern day – at least in some parts of the world.

The impact on this shift of influence on the four drivers is somewhat speculative, but interesting nevertheless.  First, the significance of procreation is decreased – we’ve seen clearly over the past few decades how increasingly effective contraceptives have decoupled sex from procreation.  Correspondingly, fulfillment is increased.  This is a response in part to the decoupling of sex and procreation enabled by advances in science and technology.  But it is also driven by a greater understanding of the biology, physiology and psychology of sex that science has enabled, which opens the door wider to understanding the roles of sex and sexuality in living a fulfilled life.  The bonding driver is also increased slightly, as science and technology both inform and better-enable the use of sex as a means of strengthening interpersonal relationships.

Then there is control.  I have no evidence for this, but I suspect that advances in science and technology are somewhat ambivalent  factors when it comes to how sex is used to establish, define and enforce relationships and hierarchies.  Given the biological and psychological drive to procreate and social complexities surrounding sex, I suspect that sex and sexuality will always have potential to be used to control, manipulate and intimidate others – it’s hard to imagine science changing this (I’m not an optimist when it comes to scientific enlightenment leading to better people!).  Where science could have an indirect impact though is in decreasing the influence of social and religious norms on the control driver.  By lowering the influence of these constraints, advances in science and technology could potentially lead to an increase in how sex is used to exert control over people.

This is all highly speculative.  But following the assessment through shows a relative increase in the influence of science over social and religious norms as emphasizing the individual over the group, and sexuality over sex.

Of course, this could all be groundless bar-psychology.  But a shift in emphasis to sexuality rather than just sex, and the individual rather than the the social group, does align crudely with trends in western society.

Whether this is because of an increasing influence of science is rather conjectural.  In reality, there will be a number of intertwined influencing factors – including changing social and religious norms.

The bottom line is that it’s possible to make a plausible association between general advances in science and technology and changes in personal and social perceptions of sex and sexuality.  But to take these associations and the model they are built on too seriously would be foolish, to say the least.

After all, what do I know?  I’m just a novice!

_______________________________

Note: Despite the somewhat frivolous tone of this piece, there is some serious thought behind it.  Nevertheless, the model above is a long way from being  a strong one.  In finishing the piece off, the positioning of the control driver has been bugging me for instance – I’m not convinced of its placement in the “individual” and “sex” quadrant.  Clearly, there is room for “Science and sexuality 2.0!”

A new report released today from the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Expert Group on Science and Trust emphasizes the need to address risk and uncertainty in developing and using science and technology within society.  “Acknowledging risk and uncertainty” is the second of eight broad aspirations from the independent group, established to develop a UK action plan to “enhance society’s capabilities to make better-informed judgements about the sciences and their uses in order to ensure that the “license to operate” is socially robust.”

The report “Starting a National Conversation about Good Science” [PDF, 478 KB] is a rich, informative and insightful document, that demands careful consideration.  It comes out of a group assembled to consider new mechanisms to increase public trust in science and engineering; review the impact of the existing science-related ethical code of practice; examine how movement of knowledge and people across the different sectors can be facilitated in order to maximize the benefits and impacts of science and society activities; and think about better ways to evaluate the impacts of science and society initiatives.  Despite this being a purely British affair, many of the recommendations are relevant far beyond the confines of a UK-centered “national conversation,”  and will hopefully stimulate a global dialogue on what is a global challenge.

Amidst the eight “broad aspirations” of the group, which span public judgment about science and awareness of the scientific process, to underpinning science-informed decision-making and good science governance, I was particularly struck by an emphasis on risk and uncertainty.  This may be because in a few weeks I will becoming increasingly involved in risk, uncertainty and science-informed decision-making, as I take over as Director of the Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan.  But beyond this, I was struck by the group’s recognition that, from the publics’ various perspectives, uncertainties surrounding science and technology – their implications in particular – are often more important than the science and technology themselves.

The overarching aim of the Science and Trust Expert Group -  and of this report – was

“To enhance society’s capabilities to make better-informed judgements about the sciences and their uses in order to ensure that the “licence to operate” is socially robust.”

In this context,the group recommended that

“Expert advice to Government should identify and characterize uncertainties; policy makers should communicate clearly actions that take account of inevitable uncertainties; efforts should be made to support public judgements about risks and uncertainties.”

In particular, the report emphasizes the need to address uncertainties surrounding the potential impacts and benefits of emerging technologies “in the wider context of science and society relations.”

This emphasis on uncertainty is particularly welcome, and closely aligns with where I hope to be taking the University of Michigan Risk Science Center over the next few years.  New technologies – or innovative ways of using existing technologies for that matter – lead to inherently uncertain futures.  There is a great danger of mistaking this uncertainty for risk (risk is a reasonably well-understood chance of something bad happening; uncertainty is a poor understanding of whether good or bad will come out of a course of action) – with the result that there is a tendency to shy away from potentially beneficial technologies, simply because we don’t know how they are going to unfold.  On the other hand, uncertainty means that we do need to move forward carefully, in case there are very real and relevant risks lurking in the shadows.  The trick is to develop better ways of handling uncertainty so that the best possible choices are made.

Being up-front about uncertainty and potential risks associated with science and technology is a critical step toward developing conversations and actions that underpin a science-informed approach to minimizing and otherwise handling uncertainty and risk.  One particularly good resource that the report recommends is A Worriers’s Guide to Risk [PDF, 222 KB] – a one-pager intended to help everyone make more sense of the seemingly unending series of stories on risk.

In its specific recommendations and actions, the Science and Trust Expert Group includes:

• Support Government to take better account of risks and uncertainties in policy making;
• Support public judgements about risks and uncertainties inherent in the scientific advisory process;
• Support policy makers to take better account of public attitudes and values to the risks, benefits and uncertainties in the governance of emerging technologies;
• Enable wider discussions in the media and elsewhere on uncertainty inherent in the scientific process; and
• Enable greater discussion of risk.

Although these are aimed fair and square at the UK, they provide a valuable template for a global conversation about good science, and its role within society.  Hopefully, now that the UK has set the pace, we will see this develop as an International conversation about good science.

A lot of things keep me up at night – everything from the trivial (“did I remember to brush my teeth?”) to the to the profound (“does it matter?” ).  But recently, I’ve been plagued more than usual in the wee small hours by the challenge of developing sustainable and resilient technologies.

Blame it on reading about too many fictional futures where post-apocalyptic dystopias dominate, but I do worry about how to ensure a secure future that depends on highly complex and specialized technologies.

Here’s my problem:  Technologies – or rather, the understanding and skills to use specific technologies – can just as easily be lost as gained.  Just because we as a global society can do something clever now, doesn’t mean that people 10, 20, 50 years down the line will still be able to do it.  Securing and maintaining technological advances requires effort – take our eyes off the ball, and the technology innovation-equivalent of entropy begins to eat away at progress.  And the more dependent we become on complex technologies, the more effort it seems we need to expend to support this dependency.

Which all makes me wonder: Are we are destined to hit a point where our global intellectual capacity is so taken up with maintaining the technological status quo, that we will loose the capacity for further technological innovation?  Or even worse; are we heading for a technology innovation impasse ends up degenerating into an uncertain and unenlightened future?

I have to say, I’m not an optimist here – that is, unless we learn how to build effective technology ratchets.

A mechanical ratchet, as everyone knows, is a device that allows movement in one direction only. By comparison, a technology ratchet can be considered as something that allows technology development to move forward, but prevents or inhibits it from moving backward.  The idea is to find ways to hold onto ground gained through technology innovation, without having to constantly expend huge amounts of effort in doing so.

This is a significant challenge.  Up until the point that we started using our heads and creating our own destiny, the progress of humans – and our evolutionary precursors – was underpinned by a rather robust biological ratchet: evolution.  Evolution is a well-honed ratchet mechanisms that ensures the successes of one generation are passed on to the next though random mutation and natural selection. In effect, progress is hard-wired into an organism’s genetic code, meaning that each subsequent generation is spared the hassle of learning the rules of survival from scratch.  But when we humans started to think for ourselves, we left this biological ratchet behind, leaving us dependent on “soft-wired” technologies that each new generation needs to be taught.

Fortunately, we’ve managed to develop some technology ratchets that have made the process of transferring knowledge from one generation to the next a little easier.  Skills like making fire, using wheels and growing crops have propagated successfully from generation to generation for thousands of years, so we must be doing something right.  But how effective are these ratchets, and are they up to the task of sustaining technology innovation in the 21st century?  The history of technology development has been “lumpy” to say the least – as civilizations have come and gone, technological ground has been lost as well as gained – suggesting that the technology ratchets of the past might be a little creaky, to say the least.

Living in what is probably the most technologically advanced and technology-dependent age of humanity to date, I’m not sure we can rely fully on old and worn technology ratchets – if we are to prevent a precarious technology-dependent society collapsing like a pack of cards at the slightest provocation, we need to proactively develop effective technology ratchets that underpin sustainable and resilient progress.

So what sort of technology ratchets should we be building?  Here are four ideas for starters:

Open-access knowledge-repositories. These used to be called libraries!  Whether stored on paper, digitally, or within cultural and social memories, widespread access to resilient and durable knowledge-bases is an important technology ratchet.  Where knowledge is privileged, easily corrupted, or temporal, it becomes increasingly hard to ensure its endurance across generations.  Ironically, while we now have access to more information than ever before, the resilience and accessibility of the “knowledge” associated within this information is by no means certain.

Skills transfer mechanisms. I was tempted to say “education” here, but what most people consider as education is part of a broader technology ratchet that ensures the skills of one generation are passed on to successive ones.  This includes knowledge transfer.  But it also includes the ability to use this knowledge.  Skills transfer mechanisms will depend on formal education – including “book-learning” and-on-the job training.  But they will also depend on learning in less formal situations – skills passed on by parents and peers, or through social interactions.  I suspect sustainable technology innovation will require more people to acquire and pass on more skills than ever before in order to succeed – and we are going to have to find new ways to achieve this.

Redundancy. Biology works so well because it has built-in redundancy.  The same information is carried by billions of cells, and there are often multiple pathways to achieving the same end.  The result is incredible resilience – throw a curve-ball at biology, and it adjusts and adapts.  It’s something that we could learn from in ensuring resilient technology innovation – redundancy as another technology ratchet.  It’s somewhat counter-intuitive, but developing multiple technology approaches to the same end lessens the chances of loosing critical knowledge and skills.  The way technology innovation currently works, redundancy often falls by the wayside (think technology monopolies for instance).  I suspect we will need to find ways to  overcome this in developing resilient and sustainable technology solutions in the future.

Cultural integration of science and technology. How can technologies be sustained in a society where those dependent on the technology haven’t the first idea of how it works – or what to do if it goes wrong?  When everything is going okay, the current model is one that works well.  But its a model with very little resilience – meaning that when things go wrong (as they are sure to do), things quickly degenerate into a mess.  The alternative is to embed an understanding and appreciation of technology – and the underlying science – within society itself.  Cultural integration of science and technology  provides an effective technology ratchet for preventing slippage in the face of new challenges.  As well as facilitating the passing-on of knowledge and skills across generations, it disperses understanding throughout society and enables informed decision-making in the face of emerging issues.  Unfortunately, many of today’s cultures do not respect science and technology to the degree that is necessary for this technology ratchet to be effective.

Astute readers might spot that these are not new ideas.  But framing them in the context of technology ratchets possibly is.  And maybe – just maybe – by framing them in this way, new light will be shed on how to use them to underpin sustainable and resilient technological progress.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that all this talk of technology ratchets is the product of chronic insomnia, and I ought to stick to safer ground in the early hours – like teeth, for instance.

But I suspect that there’s mileage in the concept.  It seems painfully inefficient to have to support each advance in technology with a sustained and long-term effort to maintain the advance – not to say precarious.  Wouldn’t it be better to develop more effective ways for each generation to lay a solid technological foundation for the following generation to build on – one that isn’t high maintenance?

That, to me, sounds like a technology ratchet.

]]> http://2020science.org/2010/03/07/why-we-need-technology-ratchets/feed/ 16 http://2020science.org/2010/01/29/technology-innovation-davos/ http://2020science.org/2010/01/29/technology-innovation-davos/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:32:04 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=2850

There’s been something of a theme running through my day at The World Economic Forum Meeting in Davos today – getting from A to B.  The “A” in this case is technology innovation, and the “B” the problems we hope it will solve – the big ones like world hunger and disease, as well as some of the smaller ones like making life a little easier and more comfortable for ourselves.  But rather than write directly about the challenge of translating technology innovation into action, I thought I would give you a sense of how things work here – at least in the outer layers of the Davos onion I’m privileged to inhabit – using getting from A to B as an example.

Having skipped the early sessions I got to the Convention Center in Davos mid-morning, to find a message from a BBC World Service reporter waiting for me. After homing in on each other across a crowded floor using the time honored mobile phone “can you see me yet…” method, it transpired he was interested in a few words on a few word on emerging economies and emerging technologies – in particular on how countries like India and China are doing compared to the US.  We did a quick interview there and then, in which I said precisely nothing of note – for which I was kicking myself afterward.  Not because I failed to say all the smart things I could have said about emerging economies (being somewhat dazed and jetlagged, I forgot that I actually knew some interesting stuff here until after the interview), but because today’s the day I’ve been focusing on a new proposal to address global issues surrounding emerging technologies; and I failed completely and utterly to get this into the conversation.  My media gurus would have been in tears had they been there.

So the day started with an opportunity – sadly blown.  Following shortly after this I met with a senior representative from a petrochemicals company – he was interested in talking about technology innovations strategies for the company.  Fortunately, having woken up a bit at this point, I was able to talk about the work we’re doing in the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils on our new emerging technologies proposal – which is designed precisely to help companies, governments, and other groups and institutions get from A to B more effectively when it comes to technology innovation.  So far, one opportunity lost, one grasped.

But the big event of the day was a Global Redesign Initiative ideasLab, where I had the opportunity to present the “big idea” to a bunch of folk who, in principle, would help hone it to perfection.  It was a format I’m not terrifically comfortable with – timed comments addressing five specific questions.  As the proposal coming out of the Global Agenda Council I work with was somewhat complex, I resorted to scripting my comments – it kills the spontaneity, but it’s the only way I know to prevent me launching into a 20 minute lecture, or spouting pure drivel (or both, simultaneously).  The presentation went okay – not brilliant, but adequate.  But then came the quickfire questions, which were supposedly to prime the following 30 minutes of discussion.  To my horror, the challenge of connecting tech innovation to social need – so clear to me – was brought into questioned by my listeners.  The message they left me with was that innovation works very well thank you very much, and who wants a cumbersome global center helping people get from A to B anyway?

Had I misjudged things that badly?

There was worse to come though.  After six five-minute presentations, the group of about 30 people broke into six discussion groups – one for each idea.  Now you know that feeling when you’re the unpopular kid and teams are being picked?  That was me.  I had no-one interested in talking about making technology innovation work.  Not a single soul.  Clearly emerging technology is the unpopular kid on the block when it comes to meetings of senior decision makers.  That, or there was something else no one was telling me about…

I’m pretty sure the lack of interest stemmed from a number of things – a fear of the unfamiliar, blind faith in tech innovation to solve problems as and when they arise, and a certain degree of masking of the difficulties of getting form A to B by retrospective success stories (masking being where a technology inadvertently solves a problem no-one has heard of, and is heralded as a great success – I’m being a tad facetious, but you get the point).

I had the chance to test these suspicions out in the following session – a panel discussion on rethinking how to feed the world, with a highly distinguished group of people.  Luckily, the discussion turned to the role of technology innovation in agriculture and food early on, and at the first opportunity I got my question in: “we talk a lot about the problems we face, and about new innovations, but how do we most effectively get from A to B?”

Bill Gates took up the challenge, and spoke about a very neat use of of synthetic biology (or something approaching it) to create drought and flood-resistant rice plants.  It’s a great example of how innovation has helped create a better product.  But it didn’t answer the question – which was how can we do better than we are doing.  Bill actually answered very intelligently.  But at the same time he seemed to confirm my fear that our success stories so often detract from where we are not doing well, and need to do better.  Especially where they lead to complacency.  (Here I should be very clear that, while Bill Gates confirmed my growing fears that getting people to see the A to B problem is a major challenge in itself, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is doing a tremendous amount to support the innovation side of the equation.)

I was a little more heartened by Ellen Kullman, CEO of DuPont, who circled back to the question later on.  She touched on the problem of finding workable solutions to developing more effective food supplies, acknowledging that you need tech innovation and ways to make it work.  The example she cited was DuPont’s approach to working with local farming communities in Africa, so there is local “ownership” of the innovation.

Maybe I wasn’t as off-track as I was beginning to fear.

The day ended with a private dinner of World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council members.  I sat next to three prominent thought-leaders – a neurologist, an economist and a priest.  And I took the opportunity to burden them with my A to B problem.  Not only did they take me seriously, but we had an excellent discussion about where the ideas behind the proposal made sense, where perhaps they didn’t.  The economist was worried about constraining innovation by trying to match it to needs.  The neurologist on the other hand feared that the process of innovation isn’t driven by social need – so there is a real danger of solving challenges that aren’t problems, while leaving the ones that are untouched.  I forget what the priest said – at some point the conversation got on to the far more entertaining topic of religious jokes.

At the end of the day, maybe I hadn’t convinced someone with deep pockets and influence that the A to B problem is of utmost importance.  But I had had a string of unique opportunities to test the concept out, to refine my own thoughts and ideas, and to develop links that will be of lasting value.  And this more than anything is what Davos is about perhaps – grasping opportunities, making connections, being exposed to new ideas and having your own challenged.

I still believe that we have a real problem on our hands in working out how to get from A to B in translating technology innovation into socially responsive action.  But I now have a far better sense of where the possible solutions lie, and how to help people see not only the challenge, but the possible ways forward.

All in all, not a bad day.

This evening I was invited to talk to a group of industry leaders on alternative solutions to the “carbon” problem at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.  The brief was to be one of three “firestarters” – a bit of a dangerous one if you ask me.  Given the informal setting (this was all off the record and over dinner), my comments were aimed at being provocative and challenging, and were probably more full of holes than the proverbial sieve – perfect material in other words for a blog!

For past 100 years—from the tail end of the industrial revolution, through the chemicals revolution and into the digital revolution—we have been passive observers of our effects on the planet.  Over the next 100 years, we will need to take an active role in managing these effects if we are to avoid potentially catastrophic impacts on large numbers of the world’s population.

Top of the immediate agenda (but by no means the only item on it) is global warming.  We are now so numerous and “industrious” that our actions – in this case the indiscriminate emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases – are leading to planet-wide re-actions that threaten the lives and livelihood of millions of people around the globe.  Building a sustainable future will mean actively managing our role in global warming.  And critical to this is controlling the impact of carbon emissions.  We need to get a better handle on where carbon comes from, where it goes, and what it does in between.

In effect, we need to “own” the carbon cycle

The question is, how?  I’d like to suggest that owning the carbon cycle – or at least getting better at managing it – will depend on two apparently contradictory approaches: slowing down, and speeding up.

Slowing down

The carbon cycle is a slow cycle.  It takes tens to thousands of years for carbon to cycle between being released into the atmosphere, absorbed by plants and oceans, and eventually being re-released—this balloons to millennia when you include the sequestration of carbon in rocks and sediment.  And the last thing you want to do to a slow cycle is push it too hard and too fast.  The consequences are unpredictable, could be long lasting, and may well be catastrophic.

If we are to get a better handle on atmospheric carbon and its impact on global warming, we need to learn to match our “carbon speed” to the carbon cycle – to slow down our part in the process.  Not surprisingly, this means using less energy, using alternate sources of energy, and doing more with the energy we have.

The challenge is how to slow down enough to make a difference.  In part, this will depend on finding technology-based solutions to how we generate and use energy.

Conventional technologies get us some of the way to managing our energy-use and carbon emissions.  But not all the way.  We still depend in the main on non-renewable and “dirty” energy sources, and are incredibly wasteful in how we use what we have – convenience still trumps efficiency it would seem.  Emerging technologies on the other hand provide a number of solutions to slowing down our part in the carbon cycle.  For instance, we are developing LED lights that use a fraction of the energy of incandescent and fluorescent bulbs to provide the same levels illumination.  We are learning to modify the genetic code of bacteria in ways that enable them to produce biofuels from renewable and sustainable resources.  And we are constructing lighter materials, better batteries and smart energy grids that allow us to do more with the energy we generate.

Many of these emerging technologies depend on manipulating the world at the scale of atoms and molecules – the building blocks of matter.  It’s a trick we’ve been getting increasingly good at in recent years.  This area of technology often goes under the banner of nanotechnology – the science and technology of doing stuff at the near-atomic scale.  More recently synthetic biology – the science and technology of manipulating living systems at the atomic scale – has been getting increasing press.  In these and related areas, we’re making good progress.

But if we are to succeed in slowing down our part in the carbon cycle we also need new economic and social frameworks in which to operate. We need to think differently about how to develop and use science and technology effectively, and how to predict and overcome potential hurdles to progress.

Speeding up

Then there is speeding up.  It sounds contradictory, but in parallel with slowing down as we take charge of the carbon cycle, we also need to go faster.

We have already pushed the carbon cycle out of equilibrium.  This was not a smart move, as we have started a chain of events that are going to be tough to control. As a result, we need to move fast to mitigate the potential consequences of our current actions if we are to avoid long-term impacts.  Amongst other things, this means developing and implementing strategies for actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Carbon sequestration, like other forms of active global climate intervention, is a dicey long-term strategy.  It treats a symptom rather than a cause.  Yet we are going to have to triage the planet and mitigate some of the more severe symptoms of our presence, before we can begin working on long term solutions to owning the carbon cycle.

Approaches to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere range from planting more trees, to absorbing carbon dioxide in new materials, to accelerating parts of the carbon cycle such as carbon accumulation and subsequent sequestration in marine algae.  Some of the technologies being discussed are reasonably well established; others are still over the horizon.  Many of them rely on engineering materials at the atomic and molecular scale; another reason we need to invest intelligently in developing and using nanoscale technologies.

But there are also big questions here that go beyond the science and technology: What would it take to make carbon sequestration economically viable? What are the risks—the short and long term consequences?  And what are the social and political barriers that need to be addressed to make carbon sequestration effective?  The bottom line is that although the idea of carbon sequestration is attractive, we still don’t know whether it is viable.

Part of the issue is that the challenges of intervening in planetary-scale processes are immense.  We don’t have a good sense of the consequences of scaling up attempts to actively modify the atmosphere on a global scale.  We have no idea how to do a risk analysis on a one-shot planet-wide experiment.  And we are struggling to find solutions to social, economic and political issues that transcend normally rigid boundaries.

Nevertheless, speeding up the process of managing the impacts of carbon emissions is essential if we are to ultimately develop long-term sustainable solutions to managing the carbon cycle itself.

Looking to the future

I’ve tried to be a little provocative here – I don’t think we will ever fully “own” the carbon cycle.  But I do think we need a mindset-change, where we begin to think about taking an active role in planetary management, if we are to pave the way for a sustainable future.

This mindset change must embrace slowing down—learning how to work with cycles like the carbon cycle rather than against them.

But it must also enable some speeding up – the planet needs some rapid and drastic first aid if we are going to be around long enough to implement long-term strategies.

In both cases, we won’t get very far if we don’t invest more – far more – in supporting new science and developing new technologies, and understanding how to use these in an increasingly complex global social, economic and political environment.

The bad news is that we’re not very good at using new technologies to solve global problems.  The good news is that we are fast learners when we want to be.

The question is – are we smart enough to learn how to own the carbon cycle?  Or are we destined to remain passive observers as we face an increasingly precarious future?

Having just got back to the hotel at some unseemly hour (at least according to my body clock) from the first full day of meetings at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, I’m trying my best to be disciplined and write some of my impressions up.  As it’s late, I’ll be brief:

Scenery: Stunning (I’ll try for some photos later in the week).

Security: High.

Meeting: Steep learning curve to work out where everything is, never mind how to get to where I’m supposed to be

People: Surprisingly normal (apart from a tendency to spontaneously “network” – my theory is they have no idea whether who they are speaking to is someone important or a nobody, so they hedge their bets and go with the former.  Pity them when they encounter me!)

Celebs: Was too busy to to notice.  Okay so I did pass Bill Clinton in the corridor, almost had the chance to talk to Margaret Atwood, and shook Lang Lang’s hand.  But that’s all…

Sessions: Stimulating.  Interesting session with folks fro MIT on intelligence – a lot to assimilate there (must confess to being shocked at the idea of using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation – TMS – on kids.  Need to think more about this).  Sarkozy was riveting, whether you agree with him or not.  Dinner with Technology Review’s Jason Pontin was thought provoking and entertaining.  What was particularly interesting was that while the dinner was focused on technology breakthroughs, the discussion gravitated rapidly to talking about broader social, ethical and political issues.  I didn’t even have to prompt them!

And the mitts? Jason asked me to entertain to dinner and I took him literally, illustrating that the gloves are off when it comes to engineering matter at the atomic scale.   The point being that we now have far greater dexterity than ever before in how we engineer matter at the nanometer scale, and this is helping us to make things that work better.  Not too many people complained about the theatrics

More tomorrow, if I can stand the pace.

I‘m sitting here at Dulles Airport waiting for my flight to Zurich and the annual World Economic Forum Meeting in Davos, so I thought I’d dash off a quick blog.  If you’re on the ball, you will realize that by arriving tomorrow, I will be missing most of the first day of the meeting.  This is intentional – I’m doing Davos on a budget (which is why I am also flying on frequent flier miles – but more of that later in the week possibly.  In the meantime, I’m crossing my fingers that they don’t place me in the dreaded toilet seat!).

In preparation, I’ve spent the day pulling my talking points together.  I’m supposed to be speaking at four events, in addition to sampling the delights of the rest of the meeting.

To kick off, I’m talking about science and technology breakthroughs at a dinner hosted by Jason Pontin – Editor in Chief of Technology Review.  With my usual impeccable timing, this is in the evening of the day I arrive, so it’s touch and go whether I will actually be awake and coherent when speaking.  Always a sucker for cheap theatrics, this is where I will be using a just-purchased pair of faux sheepskin mittens for visual impact (at least that’s the intention, as long as I can get them on.  A last minute purchase, I had to settle for a rather narrow pair of woman’s mitts).

Thursday I’m talking emerging technologies and climate change management/mitigation with a bunch of industry leaders.  Again it’s a dinner event, so the chances of me eating a square meal that evening are slim.  The main aim here is to finish in time to hear James Cameron talking about Avatar later that evening.

Friday I’m pitching an idea for a new global center on emerging technologies intelligence, as part of the Davos IdeasLab series.  Should be interesting – I have five minutes to pitch the idea to a group of folk, against a backdrop of five text-less timed Powerpoint slides.  It’s a bit like a sudden death presentation…

Saturday I’m a free agent – unless someone finds out, in which case I could well find myself dragged into something at the last minute.

Sunday I join what looks like scores of presenters in a large brainstorming session on the “Global Agenda 2010″ – not sure what to expect here.

Then it’s party time, before heading back next Monday – again hoping that I avoid that seat especially reserved for frequent flier users and other undesirables.

That’s it for now.  See you on the other side of the Atlantic.

This week I’m heading out to the World Economic Forum jamboree in Davos, Switzerland.  I’d like to play this cool – as if rubbing shoulders with politicians, business leaders and celebs is something I do all the time.  But the reality is that this is my first time to what is probably the biggest annual gathering of world thought-leaders and decision-makers, and I’m just a little star-struck!

The World Economic Forum has been gathering world leaders together to address emerging challenges and opportunities in an informal and intimate setting for four decades now – this year’s Annual Meeting is the fortieth.  It’s a unique forum, where political and business leaders rub shoulders with academics, activists and celebrities as they get a handle on the major issues facing society around the world.  This is one of the few places where you run the chance of bumping into people like Bono, Bill Gates and Al Gore as you get your morning coffee.

Held in the Swiss Ski resort of Davos, a mix of formal, informal and private meetings brings a diverse group of people together to not only discuss the issues facing the world, but to craft workable solutions.  In the 2500 people at this year’s meeting, there will over 900 chief executives from a wide range of business sectors, government representatives from the world’s top 25 economies and fast-growing small countries (including heads of state and government), civil society leaders, academics, thought-leaders and media representatives.

Within this rather eclectic mix, I will be talking to people about emerging technologies, and their place in 21st century global society.  It’s an area that fits glove-in-hand with this year’s theme – “Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild” – but is often overlooked in the social, economic and policy debates.  There’s a tendency to simply assume that science and technology will come up with solutions to pressing problems – my job is to disabuse people of this fancy, and get some concerted action on how we are going to actively ensure science and technology help improve people’s lives without creating more problems than they solve.

Over the next few days, I’ll be blogging and tweeting from Davos (assuming I have any time in a schedule that starts early in the morning, and seems to extend to early the next morning).  Just to avoid disappointment, I won’t be dishing the dirt on off the record meetings – there are rules to respect here.  I will try and provide a sense of my experiences here though, and in particular how emerging technologies seem to be fitting in to the grand scheme of things.

But back to being just a little star-struck.  Glimpsing through the program (I’m still filling my dance card) I see that Lang Lang (the pianist) will be performing, Margaret Atwood will be talking about After the Flood and James Cameron will be discussing Avator – and that’s before I’ve even got to the serious socioeconomic stuff.

I wonder if any of them are interested in talking emerging tech over an espresso…

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As well as posting the occasional blog from Davos, I will be posting short comments on Twitter and the 2020 Science Facebook Page.  I also see that Jason Pontin – Editor in Chief and publisher of Technology Review – will be tweeting from the event (I’ll be talking with Jason and a few others on science and technology breakthroughs next Wednesday).

]]> http://2020science.org/2010/01/24/from-davos-with-love/feed/ 6 http://2020science.org/2010/01/18/no-small-matter-taster/ http://2020science.org/2010/01/18/no-small-matter-taster/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:28:38 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=2826

To accompany the review just posted of Felice Frankel and George Whitesides’ book “No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale” the authors kindly allowed me to post this series of excerpts.  What I wanted to capture here was the synergy between the images and the prose – and how together they pull the reader in.

This is just a small taste (bad pun – sorry) of what the book offers.  If you enjoyed it and want to see more – I’m sure you know your way to a good bookstore by now.

As people seem to expect this these days, I should be clear that this is an independent review, using a copy of No Small Matter purchased from my own hard earned cash!

How do you write a book about something few people have heard off, and less seem interested in?  The answer, it seems, is to write about something else.

Felice Frankel and George Whitesides have clearly taken this lesson to heart. Judged by the cover alone, their new book “No Small Matter:  Science at the Nanoscale” is all about science in the Twilight zone of the nanoscale – where stuff doesn’t behave in the way intuition says it should.  Open the cover, and you are drawn into a seductive world of stunning images and poetic prose, that reveal as much about the authors’ passions and delights as the science that drives them. Finish the book, and you will have a far more sophisticated grasp of nanotechnology than most of your friends and, dare I say it, many of the people currently working in the field.  Because this is the sleight of hand that Frankel and Whitesides pull – by not writing about nanotechnology, they have published what is perhaps the best book on the subject to date!

But all this is besides the point.  Because more than anything, No Small Matter is about the delight of understanding and appreciating better the world in which we find ourselves.  This is a book that is simple enough for a child to appreciate, and subtle enough to keep the most cynical intellectual engaged.  It’s the sort of book I would strongly recommend you read (and read again) – not because I think you should, but because I think you’ll enjoy it.

The key to this remarkable book – and I choose my words carefully here – is the synergy between Frankel’s images and Whitesides prose (see these excerpts for an example).  Whitesides’ writing is poetic, engaging – it draws you in.  Even re-reading the book for this review, I find myself savoring the lines.  It’s not that Whitesides avoids long words and complex ideas – try this one for size for instance: “Anthropomorphizing capillarity into affection or avarice is misleading but unavoidably appealing.”  But he writes with an openness, enthusiasm and deceptive simplicity that pulls the reader in – you can almost see the glint in his eye as you read.  Take this passage for example from the book’s introduction:

“This book is about small things.  They’re different – sometimes really, and enthrallingly, different.  We humans have always been fascinated by “small”: the gears and springs of a fine watch, embroidery, a jumping spider – each is a distinct kind of marvel.  We think of ourselves as master artisans, and we have a connoisseur’s appreciation of delicate work.”

Rather than lecturing, Whitesides seeks to help you see the world through his eyes.

But the prose – beautiful as they are – are only part of the equation here.  The real genius of the book is the merging of Whitesides’ writing with Frankel’s images.  On their own, many of the images appear mundane (although the skill behind them is far from trivial).  Placed alongside Whitesides’ writing, something special happens.  The images draw out the full flavor of the prose, seasoning them to perfection.  Take this description of combustion:

“The smallest flames share features in common with the largest: a burning candle tells the story as well as a coal-fired electrical power plant; only details are different in a coal fire and a diesel engine.  Here, the heat from the flame melts the hydrocarbon candle wax; the liquid wax climbs up the wick; heat radiated from the flame vaporizes the wax; the vapor mixes with air; a complex series of chemical reactions in the hot region – the flame – convert wax and oxygen to carbon dioxide and water.  At an intermediate point in the flame zone, small particles of unburned carbon – at a temperature of approximately 1000 C – glow yellow.  When combustion is incomplete, unburned carbon particles cool to smoke or soot.”

The story is elegantly told.  But it is Frankel’s exquisite photograph of a candle flame beside it that connects the description to reality, and helps you appreciate the intricate science involved in an apparently simple process.

Another wonderful example comes in Whitesides’ discussion of wave-particle duality, which is dominated by his thoughts on math and poetry:

“We’re burdened by a curious conditioning that blinds us to one of the greatest—perhaps the greatest—of art forms. We live for poetry; we live in terror of equations.

We see a poem, and we try it on for size: we read a line or two; we roll it around in our mind; we see how it fits and tastes and sounds. We may not like it, and let it drop, but we enjoy the encounter and look forward to the next. We seen an equation, and it is as if we’d glimpsed a tarantula in the baby’s crib. We panic.

Equations are the poetry that we use to describe the behavior of electrons and atoms, just as we use poems to describe ourselves…

Poetry describes humanity with a human voice; equations describe a reality beyond the reach of words. Playing a fugue, and tasting fresh summer tomatoes, and writing poetry, and falling in love all ultimately dissolve into molecules and electrons, but we cannot yet (and perhaps, ever) trace the path from one end (from molecules) to the other (us). Not with poetry, not with equations. But each guides us part way.

Of course, not all equations are things of beauty: some are porcupines, some are plumber’s helpers, and some are tarantulas.”

And the accompanying image?  A photograph of Louis de Broglie’s wave equation – hand written.

But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the images are merely an illumination for the text.  Some of them  capture perfectly the world of the nanoscale.  Others are cleverly crafted metaphors – a glass apple with a cubic shadow for instance; a metaphor for quantum objects that have attributes that seem irreconcilably at odds.

The heart of the book is sixty short essays, accompanied by images.  These are divided into seven sections, loosely covering “smallness;” strange behavior at the nanoscale; living things; why science at the nanoscale matters; dangers and challenges; and whether this is all the next big thing, or merely a storm in a teacup.  The essays are loosely linked, but each stands on its own.  Taken together, they seem at first to follow a random walk through Whitesides’ imagination – a comfortable mix of personal reflection and science on subjects that pique his curiosity.  But rather cleverly, they coalesce to provide a coherent sense of nanoscience.  And in doing so, provide what is perhaps the most honest and clear sense of nanotechnology that I have read.

The challenge here is that nanotechnology is not back and white – it’s not easy to say “this is nanotechnology; that is not.”  Other writers have tried to draw clear lines around the technology.  But in doing so, they have come perilously close to diminishing the wonder of seeing how the world works at the nanoscale, or the innovation that comes from using this knowledge.  Frankel and Whitesides on the other hand don’t draw boundaries – they are content with talking about stuff that is small, and different, and exciting, and awe inspiring.  They are happy working in gray areas that defy clear definition.  And they set out to enlighten, not instruct.

The result is a book that will delight anyone with an interest in the material world and an appreciation of poetic prose and eye catching images.

A series of image and text from the book can be seen here.

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As people seem to expect this these days, I should be clear that this is an independent review, using a copy of No Small Matter purchased from my own hard earned cash!

For more information on the book and the review, check out the 2020 Science Facebook page

Ten years ago at the close of the 20th century, people the world over were obsessing about the millennium bug – an unanticipated glitch arising from an earlier technology.  I wonder how clear it was then that, despite this storm in what turned out to be a rather small teacup, the following decade would see unprecedented advances in technology – the mapping of the human genome, social media, nanotechnology, space-tourism, face transplants, hybrid cars, global communications, digital storage, and more.  Looking back, it’s clear that despite a few hiccups, emerging technologies are on a roll – one that’s showing no sign of slowing down.

So what can we expect as we enter the second decade of the twenty first century?  What are the emerging technology trends that are going to be hitting the headlines over the next ten years?

Here’s my list of the top ten technologies I think are worth watching. I’m afraid that, as with all crystal ball gazing, it’s bound to be flawed. Yet as I work on the opportunities and challenges of emerging technologies, these do seem to be areas that are ripe for prime time.

Geoengineering

2009 was the year that geoengineering moved from the fringe to the mainstream.  The idea of engineering the climate on a global scale has been around for a while. But as the penny has dropped that we may be unable – or unwilling – to curb carbon dioxide emissions sufficiently to manage global warming, geoengineering has risen up the political agenda.  My guess is that the next decade will see the debate over geoengineering intensify.  Research will lead to increasingly plausible and economically feasible ways to tinker with the environment.  At the same time, political and social pressure will grow – both to put plans into action (whether multi- or unilaterally), and to limit the use of geoengineering.  The big question is whether globally-coordinated efforts to develop and use the technology in a socially and politically responsible way emerge, or whether we end up with an ugly – and potentially disastrous – free for all.

Smart grids

It may not be that apparent to the average consumer, but the way that electricity is generated, stored and transmitted is under immense strain.  As demand for electrical power grows, a radical rethink of the power grid is needed if we are to get electricity to where it is needed, when it is needed.  And the solution most likely to emerge as the way forward over the next ten years is the Smart Grid.  Smart grids connect producers of electricity to users through an interconnected “intelligent” network.  They allow centralized power stations to be augmented with – and even replaced by – distributed sources such as small-scale wind farms and domestic solar panels.  They route power from where there is excess being generated to where there is excess demand.  And they allow individuals to become providers as well as consumers – feeding power into the grid from home-installed generators, while drawing from the grid when they can’t meet their own demands.  The result is a vastly more efficient, responsive and resilient way of generating and supplying electricity.  As energy demands and limits on greenhouse gas emissions hit conventional electricity grids over the next decade, expect to see smart grids get increasing attention.

Radical materials

Good as they are, most of the materials we use these days are flawed – they don’t work as well as they could.  And usually, the fault lies in how the materials are structured at the atomic and molecular scale.  The past decade has seen some amazing advances in our ability to engineer materials with increasing precision at this scale.  The result is radical materials – materials that far outperform conventional materials in their strength, lightness, conductivity, ability to transmit heat, and a whole host of other characteristics.  Many of these are still at the research stage.  But as demands for high performance materials continue to increase everywhere from medical devices to advanced microprocessors and safe, efficient cars to space flight, radical materials will become increasingly common.  In particular, watch out for products based on carbon nanotubes.  Commercial use of this unique material has had it’s fair share of challenges over the past decade.  But I’m anticipating many of these will be overcome over the next ten years, allowing the material to achieve at least some of it’s long-anticipated promise.

Synthetic biology

Ten years ago, few people had heard of the term “synthetic biology.”  Now, scientists are able to synthesize the genome of a new organism from scratch, and are on the brink of using it to create a living bacteria.  Synthetic biology is about taking control of DNA – the genetic code of life – and engineering it, much in the same way a computer programmer engineers digital code.  It’s arisen in part as the cost of reading and synthesizing DNA sequences has plummeted.  But it is also being driven by scientists and engineers  who believe that living systems can be engineered in the same way as other systems.  In many ways, synthetic biology represents the digitization of biology.  We can now “upload” genetic sequences into a computer, where they can be manipulated like any other digital data.  But we can also “download” them back into reality when we have finished playing with them – creating new genetic code to be inserted into existing – or entirely new – organisms.  This is still expensive, and not as simple as many people would like to believe – we’re really just scratching the surface of the rules that govern how genetic code works.  But as the cost of DNA sequencing and synthesis continues to fall, expect to see the field advance in huge leaps and bounds over the next decade.  I’m not that optimistic about us cracking how the genetic code works in great detail by 2020 – the more we learn at the moment, the more we realize we don’t know.  However, I have no doubt that what we do learn will be enough to ensure synthetic biology is a hot topic over the next decade.  In particular, look out for synthesis of the first artificial organism, the development and use of “BioBricks” – the biological equivalent of electronic components – and the rise of DIY-biotechnology.

Personal genomics

Closely related to the developments underpinning synthetic biology, personal genomics relies on rapid sequencing and interpretation of an individual’s genetic sequence.  The Human Genome Project – completed in 2001 – cost taxpayers around $2.7 billion dollars, and took 13 years to complete.  In 2007, James Watson’s genome was sequenced in 2 months, at a cost of $2 million.  In 2009, Complete Genomics were sequencing personal genomes at less than $5000 a shot.  $1000 personal genomes are now on the cards for the near future – with the possibility of substantially faster/cheaper services by the end of the decade.  What exactly people are going to do with all these data is anyone’s guess at this point – especially as we still have a long way to go before we can make sense of huge sections of the human genome.  Add to this the complication of epigenetics, where external factors lead to changes in how genetic information is decoded which can pass from generation to generation, and and it’s uncertain how far personal genomics will progress over the next decade.  What aren’t in doubt though are the personal, social and economic driving forces behind generating and using this information. These are likely to underpin a growing market for personal genetic information over the next decade – and a growing number of businesses looking to capitalize on the data.

Bio-interfaces

Blurring the boundaries between individuals and machines has long held our fascination. Whether it’s building human-machine hybrids, engineering high performance body parts or interfacing directly with computers, bio-interfaces are the stuff of our wildest dreams and worst nightmares.  Fortunately, we’re still a world away from some of the more extreme imaginings of science fiction – we won’t be constructing the prototype of Star Trek Voyager’s Seven of Nine anytime soon.  But the sophistication with which we can interface with the human body is fast reaching the point where rapid developments should be anticipated.  As a hint of things to come, check out the Luke Arm from Deka (founded by Dean Kamen).  Or Honda’s work on Brain Machine Interfaces.  Over the next decade, the convergence of technologies like Information Technology, nanoscale engineering, biotechnology and neurotechnology are likely to lead to highly sophisticated bio-interfaces.  Expect to see advances in sensors that plug into the brain, prosthetic limbs that are controlled from the brain, and even implants that directly interface with the brain.  My guess is that some of the more radical developments in bio-interfaces will probably occur after 2020.  But a lot of the groundwork will be laid over the next ten years.

Data interfaces

The amount of information available through the internet has exploded over the past decade.  Advances in data storage, transmission and processing have transformed the internet from a geek’s paradise to a supporting pillar of 21st century society.  But while the last ten years have been about access to information, I suspect that the next ten will be dominated by how to make sense of it all.  Without the means to find what we want in this vast sea of information, we are quite literally drowning in data.  And useful as search engines like Google are, they still struggle to separate the meaningful from the meaningless.  As a result, my sense is that over the next decade we will see some significant changes in how we interact with the internet.  We’re already seeing the beginnings of this in websites like Wolfram Alpha that “computes” answers to queries rather than simply returning search hits,  or Microsoft’s Bing, which helps take some of the guesswork out of searches.  Then we have ideas like The Sixth Sense project at the MIT Media Lab, which uses an interactive interface to tap into context-relevant web information.  As devices like phones, cameras, projectors, TV’s, computers, cars, shopping trolleys, you name it, become increasingly integrated and connected, be prepared to see rapid and radical changes in how we interface with and make sense of the web.

Solar power

Is the next decade going to be the one where solar power fulfills its promise?  Quite possibly.  Apart from increased political and social pressure to move towards sustainable energy sources, there are a couple of solar technologies that could well deliver over the next few years.  The first of these is printable solar cells.  They won’t be significantly more efficient than conventional solar cells.  But if the technology can be scaled up and some teething difficulties resolved, they could lead to the cost of solar power plummeting.  The technology is simple in concept – using relatively conventional printing processes and special inks, solar cells could be printed onto cheap, flexible substrates; roll to roll solar panels at a fraction of the cost of conventional silicon-based units.  And this opens the door to widespread use.  The second technology to watch is solar-assisted reactors.  Combining mirror-concentrated solar radiation with some nifty catalysts, it is becoming increasingly feasible to convert sunlight into other forms of energy at extremely high efficiencies.  Imagine being able to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight and an appropriate catalyst for instance, then recombine them to reclaim the energy on-demand – all at minimal energy loss.  Both of these solar technologies are poised to make a big impact over the next decade.

Nootropics

Drugs that enhance mental ability – increasingly referred to as nootropics – are not new.  But their use patterns are.  Drugs like ritalin, donepezil and modafinil are increasingly being used by students, academics and others to give them a mental edge.  What is startling though is a general sense that this is acceptable practice.  Back in June I ran a straw poll on 2020 Science to gauge attitudes to using nootropics.  Out of 207 respondents, 153 people (74%) either used nootropics, or would consider using them on a regular or occasional basis.  In April 2009, an article in the New Yorker reported on the growing use of “neuroenhancing drugs” to enhance performance. And in an informal poll run by Nature in April 2008, 1 in 5 respondents claimed “they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory.” Unlike physical performance-enhancing drugs, it seems that the social rules for nootropics are different.  There are even some who suggest that it is perhaps unethical not to take them – that operating to the best of our mental ability is a personal social obligation.  Of course this leads to a potentially explosive social/technological mix, that won’t be diffused easily.  Over the next ten years, I expect the issue of nootropics will become huge.  There will be questions on whether people should be free to take these drugs, whether the social advantages outweigh the personal advantages, and whether they confer an unfair advantage to users by leading to higher grades, better jobs, more money.  But there’s also the issue of drugs development.  If a strong market for nootropics emerges, there is every chance that new, more effective drugs will follow.  Then the question arises – who gets the “good” stuff, and who suffers as a result?  Whichever way you look at it, the 2010′s are set to be an interesting decade for mind-enhancing substances.

Cosmeceuticals

Cosmetics and pharmaceuticals inhabit very different worlds at the moment.  Pharmaceuticals typically treat or prevent disease, while cosmetics simply make you look better.  But why keep the two separate?  Why not develop products that make you look good by working with your body, rather than simply covering it?  The answer is largely due to regulation – drugs have to be put through a far more stringent set of checks and balances that cosmetics before entering the market, and rightly so.  But beyond this, there is enormous commercial potential in combining the two, especially as new science is paving the way for externally applied substances to do more than just beautify.  Products that blur the line are already available – in the US for instance, sunscreens and anti dandruff shampoos are considered drugs.  And the cosmetics industry regularly use the term “cosmeceutical” to describe products with medicinal or drug-like properties.  Yet with advances in synthetic chemistry and nanoscale engineering, it’s becoming increasingly possible to develop products that do more than just lead to “cosmetic” changes.  Imagine products that make you look younger, fresher, more beautiful, by changing your body rather than just covering up flaws and imperfections.  It’s a cosmetics company’s dream – one shared by many of their customers I suspect.  The dam that’s preventing many such products at the moment is regulation.  But if the pressure becomes too great – and there’s a fair chance it will over the next ten years – this dam is likely to burst.  And when it does, cosmeceuticals are going to hit the scene big-time.

So those are my ten emerging technology trends to watch over the next decade.  But what happened to nanotechnology, and what other technologies were on my shortlist?

Nanotech has been a dominant emerging technology over the past ten years.  But in many ways, it’s a fake.  Advances in the science of understanding and manipulating matter at the nanoscale are indisputable, as are the early technology outcomes of this science.  But nanotechnology is really just a convenient shorthand for a whole raft of emerging technologies that span semiconductors to sunscreens, and often share nothing more than an engineered structure that is somewhere between 1 – 100 nanometers in scale.  So rather than focus on nanotech, I decided to look at specific technologies which I think will make a significant impact over the next decade.  Perhaps not surprisingly though, many of them depend in some way on working with matter at nanometer scales.

In terms of the emerging technologies shortlist, it was tough to whittle this down to ten trends. My initial list included batteries, decentralized computing, biofuels, stem cells, cloning, artificial intelligence, robotics, low earth orbit flights, clean tech, neuroscience and memristors – there are many others that no doubt could and should have been on it.  Some of these I felt were likely to reach their prime sometime after the next decade.  Others I felt didn’t have as much potential to shake things up and make headlines as the ones I chose.  But this was a highly subjective and personal process.  I’m sure if someone else were writing this, the top ten list would be different.

And one final word.  Many of the technologies I’ve highlighted reflect an overarching trend: convergence.  Although not a technology in itself, synergistic convergence between different areas of knowledge and expertise will likely dominate emerging technology trends over the next decade.  Which means that confident as I am in my predictions, the chances of something completely different, unusual and amazing happening are…  pretty high!

Update, 12/27/09  Something’s been bugging me, and I’ve just realized what it is – in my original list of ten, I had smart drugs, but in the editing process they somehow got left by the wayside!  As I don’t want to go back and change the ten emerging technology trends I ended up posting, they will have to be a bonus.  As it is, drug delivery timelines are so long that I’m not sure how many smart drugs will hit the market before 2020.  But when they do, they will surely mark a turning point in therapeutics.  These are drugs that are programmed to behave in various ways.  The simplest are designed to accumulate around disease sites, then destroy the disease on command – gold shell nanoparticles fit the bill here, preferentially accumulating around tumors then destroying them by heating up when irradiated with infrared radiation.  More sophisticated smart drugs are in the pipeline though that are designed to seek out diseased cells, provide local diagnostics, then release therapeutic agents on demand.  The result is targeted disease treatment that leads to significantly greater efficacy at substantially lower doses.  Whether or not these make a significant impact over the next decade, they are definitely a technology to watch.

Update 12/29/09  Which emerging technologies do you thing will trend over the next decade?  Join the discussion on the 2020 Science Facebook page.

By Jim Thomas, ETC Group

A guest blog in the Alternative Perspectives on Technology Innovation series

For a fresh perspective on how to do technology governance consider starting somewhere else. I suggest York Castle in Northern England – a stark stone tower from the thirteenth century.

It was here in 1812 that the English state first executed fifteen men for the newly established crime of machine-breaking. They were Luddites – the original kind: artisan weavers who saw the factory system as an assault on their livelihoods and communities. At the time England was convulsed by the ‘machine question’ – with fiery debates in parliament and hundreds of fiery attacks on cloth mills by followers of the mythical Ned Ludd. As the first industrial revolution gathered steam, literally, the political class made a deliberate decision to side with the new industrialists. 12,000 Soldiers were deployed to quell the Luddite uprising – more than were abroad fighting Napoleon. The Frame Breaking Act made Luddism punishable by death and in time the word Luddite itself was transformed into a term of contempt and abuse that lasted all the way to 21^st century science debates. Its fair to say the Luddites lost – big time.

I should admit right now that I’m a big fan of the Luddites – Not that its much fun supporting an extinct political movement. Unlike sports teams there’s neither merchandise to buy nor Facebook groups to join (not unless you count this: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ye-Luddites/121981285761?v=info ). But I like Ned Ludd and his gang for two reasons.

Firstly I think they were right in ways they didn’t even know at the time. Our contemporary crises of climate change, overproduction and industrial pollution trace back in obvious ways to the industrial revolution as do the emergence of  urban and labour problems that flowed from the factory system and the urbanization that it gave rise to. The new cloth factories made possible a level of demand that justified establishing cotton plantations and a vicious slave trade setting in motion cycles of violence and racism that still persist today. Did the industrial revolution also bring benefits to society – of course it did although those benefits remain very unevenly distributed. Did the Luddites know they were fighting the roots of future racism. No – but their instincts were good.

Secondly I admire the Luddites for their success (albeit brief) in creating  a large-scale truly popular debate about emerging technologies. The widespread uprising of 1811-16 was more than just a wave of hysterics. Popular geek culture casts a ‘Luddite’ as a technologically inept dunce, fearful of change. Historical accounts reveal nothing of the sort. Real Luddites were adept users of complex hand weaving looms. They often espoused nuanced views on the technological revolution happening around them. They were not uniformly anti-technology: Their grievances, as recorded in song and declarations , were specifically with technologies that were “harmful to the common good” – as good a standard as any against which to asses technological appropriateness.  In their night time raids they would break some mechanical frames that they considered unjust while leaving others untouched that they considered benign. They recognised technological power as political, entwined with monopoly power and responsible for a lowering of standards and production of shoddy goods. They even practiced a radical form of democratic  technology assessment that we haven’t seen the like of since: dragging bulky mechanical looms to the market place to hold public trials in which all the community could pass judgement on the new machines – a public consultation process of the most inclusive kind.

I was once involved in organizing such a Luddite-style technology trial – at York Castle no less. A group of fellow activists dragged a motor car to the old stone tower and we set up public court, inviting bystanders to testify for or against the impact of the internal combustion engine on all our lives. Road kill, asthma, community destruction and climate change were weighed against the increased mobility and economic opportunities provided by four fast wheels. Everyone who happened to pass by became the jury.  On balance the car was found guilty of being ‘harmful to the common good’ but received a lighter sentence than the Luddites had on the same spot. This symbolic exercise in popular assessment of technology was exactly 100 years too late to influence the relevant innovation policy. Nonetheless it set me thinking: What if we weren’t too late? What if we could drag emerging technologies into a modern court of public deliberation and democratic oversight. What might that look like?

I’ve been turning over that question for about 15 years now while active in global debates on emerging technologies –  particularly GM Crops, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology and  Geo-engineering – Debates in which I’ve encountered the term Luddite, meant as a slur, more times than I care to count. Language like this tumbles carelessly out of history .. but I find the parallels striking. Once again we are in the early phases of a new industrial revolution. Once again powerful technologies (Converging Technologies ) are physically remaking and sometimes disintegrating our societies. Those  of us in civil society carrying out bit-part campaigns, issuing press releases and launching legal challenges are in a sense attempting to drag technology governance away from the darkness of narrow expert committees and into the sunny court of public deliberation for a broader hearing.. It seems a perfectly reasonable and democratic urge. But there’s got to be a better and more systematic way to do that?

So far I’ve found three sets of proposals that might begin to put technology oversight into the open and back in the hands of a wider public:

• Public Engagement: Citizens Juries, Knowledge exchanges, People’s Commissions.

No don’t yawn. I grant you that science policy types (and the rest of us) have every reason to groan when they hear the term “Public engagement in Science”. Like other  empty buzz phrases (“sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility” come to mind) its too easily appropriated – but there is still (just about) some value in imagining and practicing what actual involvement mechanisms we could craft to enable a more democratic form of innovation governance.  Citizen’s Juries in places as diverse as Andra Pradesh, Mali and Brazil have enabled marginalized groups such as farmers to at least take a place alongside seed companies and biotech giants in policy processes. While People’s Commissions (investigation processes run by citizens groups) may get short shrift from a condescending political establishment yet can often exhibit excellent foresight, drawing on sources of grassroots knowledge  that closetted self-referential science committees might never open up to. These days my faith in public engagement  is waning having watched several governments employ such processes as a thinly disguised public relations ploy or to tie up the energies of civil society. Unless a public engagement process has a clear promise by those in power that they will listen, respond and demonstrably act on reccomendations its likely to lose the interest of the participants too.

• Global Oversight: ICENT.

ICENT stands for the International Convention for the Evaluation of New Technologies – a UN level body for foresighting emerging technology trends and then applying a wide-ranging assessment process that will consider the social, environmental and justice implications of the innovation being scrutinised. It doesn’t exist yet and maybe it never will but at ETC Group we have dedicated a lot of time to imagining what such a body could look like (we even have some nifty organagrams – see pg 36-40 of this) For example there would be bodies scanning the technological horizon and others making a rough reckoning of whether a new technology needed a strong oversight framework or not. Others tasked with bringing in a broad range of knowledge (what do the indigenous folks say?) or identifying exactly the right place in the system of global governance to begin regulatory moves. At a time when tech governance is several decades late each time we find a new platform emerging (Nanotech? Synthetic Biology? Geoengineering?) An ICENT–like body could maybe get international machinery in gear a bit quicker – ideally before industrial interests have already written those technologies into next quarter’s earning sheets and are shipping them to market.

• Popular assessment : Technopedia?

The only governance and regulations that work are those where somebody is paying attention – so  rather than hide technology assessment in rarefied committees why not hand it to the wisdom of the crowds. Wikipedia may not be the most perfectly accurate source of all knowledge but it is comprehensive, up to date and flexible and provides an interesting model. Actually Wikipedia entries are often not a bad place to start if you want to suss out the societal and environmental issues raised by the zeitgeist regarding new technologies. How about a dedicated wiki site for collaborative monitoring and judging of emerging technologies? Such a site could be structured so that, unlike the halls of power, marginal voices have a space and are welcome. A grassroots army of  volunteer technology assessors could help fill out the questions that Brussels or Washington never asks: What is the feminist take on this technology? How does it impact indigenous or disabled groups? What livelihood issues does this raise for the poor? Will the global commodities trade be affected? Perhaps an extended social media approach to technology assessment could convene online juries, host global conference calls and draft peoples reports for input into policy deliberations.

Don’t get me wrong.. approaches like these are not panaceas .. Adopt them all and some of us in civil society  might still feel there are a few metaphorical mechanical frames that would still need breaking. For example I’m not sure a modern day Ned Ludd would be content to spend his whole time writing wiki entries.

Then again, at least he might participate in his own facebook group…

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Jim Thomas is a Research Programme Manager and Writer with the ETC Group based in Montreal, Canada. His background is in communications, writing on emerging technologies and international campaigning.

Formerly an organiser with grassroots direct action movements in Europe and North America, Jim spent seven years with  Greenpeace International as a campaigner on food and genetic  engineering issues before joining ETC Group in 2002. Jim organised the  first international meeting on the societal impacts of Nanotechnology (held in the European Parliament), speaks around the world on  emerging technology issues and has authored several reports, chapters and press  articles on Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology and  GeoEngineering.  He writes a regular ‘Tech Reckoning’ column for The Ecologist Magazine exploring the  politics of next generation technologies.

Trained as a historian to look back at the history of technology, Jim is now proccupied with the future of technology. Once upon a time he was an award winning slam poet but then he had children…

ETC Group have a blog too…

By George Kimbrell, International Center for Technology Assessment, and the Center for Food Safety

A guest blog in the Alternative Perspectives on Technology Innovation series

Andrew asked us to write about “how technological innovation should contribute to life in the 21^st century.”  Technological innovation is often blindly referred to as “progress.”  The question is — progress towards what?

We live in the age of technology.  In past generations, most people spent the majority of their time in nature, and then in later years more often in social settings.  In the modern world, most of us spend an ever-increasing amount of time in an interconnected web of machines.  I’d like to say I’m writing this on a riverside, but unfortunately I’m not – I’m in my office typing on my laptop, with my email open on a different web browser.

What currently drives this technological innovation, this technological bubble that defines our age?  In modern society, self-interest, greater productivity, greater consumption, the laws of supply and demand and the commoditization of the world are all drivers.  This economic system, which has now succeeded in global hegemony, dictates all our social interactions. Far from being a natural state of being, it is of course only as old as the United States (Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776) and not based on any natural law. In early societies, the market system was never the method by which basic societal problems were addressed; rather the marketplace was delegated only a limited role by our ancestors compared to their cultural and religious beliefs and social patterns.  Nature (not to mention labor), although treated as such, is not a commodity. Nature does not respond to supply and demand. The old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest will not speed up their growth rate to address increased demand.  More fundamentally, the natural world has intrinsic, incalculable value above and far beyond “market values”.  Even the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) recognizes this truth, in that it prohibits the extermination of species no matter how lucrative the activity  that is causing the killing.

Not only are the current dominant economic systems and their intertwined technological systems at odds with the ecological cycles of the natural world, but they are also actively and quickly eviscerating the planet.  We are exponentially reducing the earth’s capacities in every natural realm: land, air, water, and everything in between, through ozone depletion, acid rain, species extinction, deforestation, and desertification.  By commodifying nature to match our own systems we are threatening the planets’ survival and our own.  Global warming illustrates this conclusion best: Our industrial technologies have created the first global environmental crisis in human history.

We now face what is known as the technological dilemma—the “developed” portion of the world’s population has become dependent on the technological environment. Yet the same technologies that support life for the richest part of human population are threatening the very viability of life on Earth.  Even former President George W. Bush said we are “addicted to oil.”  And this addiction to these unhealthy systems of production is destroying our world.  To paraphrase and apply the wisdom of Rowlf the Dog from the Muppets to market-based mass consumerism: we can’t live with our technologies, and we can’t imagine living without them.

These are not new revelations.  And there are really only two options.  Forty years ago, writers and leaders began urging that we institute “appropriate technologies” in sync with the cycles of nature, rather than the mega-global-techno-systems causing planetary and human peril.  Attorneys and policymakers have succeeded in passing and utilizing laws that would limit the impacts of capital and industrial systems, like the ESA.  Scientists began to develop more holistic visions of their vocations.  This approach/option is a step toward addressing economic development within the context of rather than at the expense of our global environment and the society which depends upon it.

But others too have come to the conclusion that our current technology is not compatible with life.  They have foreseen the growing conflict between globalization, mass consumption, and the laws of nature.  However, their solution to the dilemma is very different.  Rather than change our economics and technology to better comport with the needs of living things, corporations and governments began to engineer life itself to better accommodate the market system and the technologies upon which it is predicated.  Ignoring the constraints of the natural world, living systems are to be remade, engineered at the genetic and molecular level to further the necessities of the technological age.

What’s the result of this worldview?  You probably see where this is going.  Genetic engineering, or recombinant DNA technology, is seen as the tool by which we can alter life at the genetic level to better fit industrial production systems and become a technological commodity.  Cloning is seen as the tool by which we can emulate the factory model of identical production for life forms.  Rather than redesigning industrial agriculture to fit the animal’s natural behavior, we are redesigning the animal to fit industrial agriculture.  Because patent control spurred production for products, we must now patent plants, animals, and human genes and cells.  Nanotechnology is a means by which we can control and manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular level to enhance industrial processes.  Lastly, synthetic biology is a means by which we combine several of these tools to create and design entirely new life forms to perform our industrial tasks. Even Dr. Frankenstein was cautious enough to not make his creature a mate; “synthetic biologists,” on the other hand, want their creatures to reproduce before systems are in place to control them.

Got environmental problems? Global warming does not to be addressed by stopping harmful greenhouse gas emissions and putting in place strictures to address systemic problems; instead, we should geo-engineer the planet to ameliorate the problem, or genetically engineer plants to be more drought- tolerant or trees to grow faster.  Chemical pollution causing environmental and health hazards? We do not need to reduce our use of harmful pesticides; instead, we should engineer production plants to be immune to them.  Pigs and chickens not amenable to horrific close-confinement factory farming?  Don’t encourage organic and humane farming and change the systems by making industrial agriculture internalize the true costs of its production; instead,  genetically alter the animals to withstand extreme confinement and diseases that proliferate therein.  Wild salmon runs dying out?  Don’t remove the dams and stop the pollution, farm them and genetically re-engineer them to grow faster in crowded, polluted ponds.

So where does that leave us?  Well, first, we must recognize and address the underlying philosophy and economy that drives and controls technological innovation. An order of magnitude in change is required; we must institute a paradigm-shift to a system of governance and life that is based on coexistence with and benefit to natural systems: An earth-centered system.  As Thomas Berry explains in The Dream of Earth, we must move from the technological age to the ecological age.  We must begin treating ourselves and the natural world as part of an interconnected web; stop thinking in straight lines and start thinking in circles.  “Progress” must include the natural as well as the human world, encouraging mutually enhancing human-earth relationships.  Human technologies should function in an integral relationship with earth technologies, not in a despotic manner.  Nature, over hundreds of millions of years and through an infinite number of experiments, worked out ecosystems that were already flourishing abundantly when we came to exist.  How can technological innovation help us determine how we can best be present in this context?  Modern society must treat life and the natural world as the spiritual force it is.  There must be a mystique of rivers if we are ever going to restore the purity of our rivers.  This is not a new idea, it is actually the oldest.  Is this an idealized vision? Perhaps, but it’s a considerably less naive world vision that that which claims we can sustain our current industrial system.

Can technological innovation help us get there?  If it changes the course current path we’re going down, if it helps stop the bleeding.  If it breaks away from being driven by corporate profits, and instead helps spread knowledge, wisdom, and awareness.  If it helps us flesh out and establish an earth-centered system to replace the current oppressive paradigm.  We must evolve our technological systems so that they are democratic and responsive to us, that we are responsible for them, and so that they comport with nature and with life forms on the earth.  We can dust off the old ways and make them the new again, making them more seductive and more logical than our current destructive ways. Only with these changes will technological innovation properly serve the planet and enhance, as well as extend, a meaningful human experience.

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George A. Kimbrell is a staff attorney for the nonprofit Center for Food Safety (CFS) and its parent organization International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA), based in San Francisco, California.  He practices environmental and administrative law with a focus on legal and policy issues related to new and emerging technologies.  For ICTA, he works on matters involving nanotechnology, biotechnology and climate change technologies.  For CFS, he covers genetically engineered food and crops, organic standards, factory farming and aquaculture.

Mr. Kimbrell received his J.D. magna cum laude from Lewis and Clark Law School and has a B.A. from the College of William and Mary.  Prior to joining ICTA and CFS, he completed a clerkship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

I do not here officially represent my organizations or clients.  The views discussed herein owe much to the ideas and writings of others.  For more detailed discussion of many of these issues, please see, inter alia, Andrew Kimbrell, Salmon Economics (and other lessons), Twenty-Third Annual E.F. Schumacher Lectures, Stockbridge, Mass. (Oct 2003).

By Richard Worthington, Loka Institute

A guest blog in the Alternative Perspectives on Technology Innovation series

My first scholarly engagement with environmental politics was an honor’s thesis written while I was an undergraduate at Berkeley in the early 1970s.  Back then, the term “environmentalist” was frequently deployed to profile someone held to be a naïve, irresponsible and possibly dangerous enemy of the American Way of Life.

The simple fact, however, is that concerns about environmental decay and support for environmental improvement have been consistently voiced by most Americans since the 1970s.  The strategy of branding environmentalists as extremists was therefore eroded by the enduring reality that most people who are active in this arena were and are ordinary folks who are confronted by extraordinary problems.

Seeing that they could not beat environmental sentiments, by the 1990s many industry leaders decided to embrace them.  Their opponents quickly invented terms such as  “greenwash” in order to frame industry’s new environmentalism as a cynical ploy, but in terms of actual outcomes, the polluters clearly won.  More than moving toward ecological balance, the Clinton-Gore years were notable for privatization, deregulation, and revving up industrial growth and consumption.  This despite the publication of Al Gore’s eloquent and even radical Earth in the Balance only a few months before his election as Vice-President. The Bush years only amplified the familiar refrain of growth and conquest (of nature and other countries).

The problem for growth-first  advocates is that ecological disruption and its consequences won’t go away.  Material circumstances thus continue to drive broad-based environmental concern, while the most powerful interests in global society have only begun to talk about action to address the imbalance between the technosphere and the ecosphere.  I write this in Copenhagen, where the largest environmental convention in history is attempting to grapple with the real prospect that the quality of life everywhere is imperiled by a human-induced alteration of the climate.  Practically no one here is questioning the legitimacy of climate concerns, and just about everyone is hailing a new green economy, yet expectations of significant progress toward this goal are low.

What’s nanotechnology got to do with this?  As it turns out, nanotech is central in a discourse where a third framing of “environment” and “ecology” has evolved.  In this version, the system of science-driven innovation that is now at the center of global economic growth strategies is itself considered an ecosystem, even though plants, animals (other than humans) and the other elements normally associated with the term “ecology” are nowhere to be found.

I first encountered this move to conflate new technology and ecology during the 1980s in the works of conservative political economist George Gilder.  Gilder was enthralled with digital information technology, which he credited with delivering “a billion Asians” from penury (in “Telecosm:  The Bandwidth Revolution”, Forbes ASAP, 1994, p. 117).   Perhaps more noteworthy was Gilder’s rhetorical move to describe the digital world in ecological terms.

“More ecosystem than machine, cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment that is literally universal:  It exists everywhere there are telephone wires, coaxial cables, fiber-optic lines or electromagnetic waves.  This environment is ‘inhabited’ by knowledge…existing in electronic form” (Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, 1994, prepared for the Progress and Freedom Foundation).

Nano has now replaced digital in this genre.  Here’s how no less a figure than Mihail C. Roco, Senior Advisor for Nanotechnology to the United States National Science Foundation, describes the system for governing nanotechnology:

“IRGC (International Risk Governance Council) views the stakeholder groups involved [in nanogovernance] as operating within a dynamic ecosystem of interlocking dependencies.  The task is therefore to create an adaptive, collaborative environment enabling different parties to play their part in the ecosystem” (ISO Focus, “Guest View“, April 2007, p.6).

Here, a distinctively human artifice is represented as a natural system.

The narrative of ecology and society that now includes nanotech thus goes like this:  at the dawn of the contemporary environmental movement, industry leaders equated environmentalism with extremism in an attempt to undermine its legitimacy.  After this tactic had run its course, they proclaimed their own environmental concern in order to obfuscate a largely unchanged agenda of industrial growth at all costs.  Now, the system of technology-driven economic growth that currently has nanotechnology as its poster child is depicted to actually be an ecosystem.

People and nature, of course, are inextricably interdependent, so there is a sound basis for including human society in a concept of ecology.  But if the distinction between non-human nature and the product of human endeavors is erased from the idea of ecology, our ability to distinguish a manufactured human society from one in which people and nature exist in a dynamic balance will be undermined.  Should it come to pass, this scenario could well make us wish for the good old days when “environmentalist” was an epithet.

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Rick Worthington is involved in nanotechnology issues by way of volunteer collaborations at  the Loka Institute, whose mission is “Making research, science and technology responsive to democratically-decided social and environmental concerns” (for a summary of and links to Loka’s involvement in nanotech, visit http://www.loka.org/FedNanoPolicy.html).  He is also Professor of Politics and chairs the Program in Public Policy Analysis at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Rick has written extensively on science, technology and the environment (including in a book, Rethinking Globalization:  Production, Politics, Actions, Peter Lang Publishing, 2000), and currently is U.S. Coordinator of World Wide Views on Global Warming.  WWViews is the first-ever global citizen policy consultation, held September 26, 2009.  In it, nearly 4,000 citizens in 38 countries studied and debated the issues now on the table in Copenhagen (December 7 – 18, 2009) at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (www.wwviews.org).

By Geoff Tansey

A guest blog in the Alternative Perspectives on Technology Innovation series

Andrew posed the question, “How should technology innovation contribute to life in the 21^st century?”

For me, working on creating a well-fed world, the short answer is: in a way that supports a diverse, fair and sustainable food system in which everyone, everywhere can eat a healthy safe, culturally appropriate diet. For that to happen, we need a change of direction in which the key innovations needed are social, economic and political, not technological. And the question is:  what kind of technology, developed by whom, for whom, will help; who has what power to decide on what to do and to control it, who carries the risks and gets the benefits.

Take the debate on GM technology, for example. We in the Food Ethics Council, building on a recent magazine (volume 3 issue 3 of Food Ethics Magazine), and five previous reports (Getting personal 2005, Just knowledge 2004, Engineering nutrition 2003, Trips with everything 2002, Novel foods 1999), are actively involved in reframing the debate. We argue that instead of asking, ‘how can GM technology help secure global food supplies’, we need to ask ‘what can be done – by scientists but also by others – to help the world’s hungry?’

When I stared the journal Food Policy in the mid 1970s we were worried about how to prevent the recurrence of the food crisis of the early 1970s and feed a population expected to increase by 50% by 2000. Sound familiar? In fact today, although more people are fed now than then, there are more hungry people now, 1.02 billion and far more overweight and obese people, 1.3bn as well as up to 2 billion people with micronutrient deficiencies. What we have developed in the rich world is a dysfunctional food system.

Technological innovation will not solve the problems of hunger and malnutrition in the future – just as it has not in the past – because they are not technical problems. But the kind of technological innovation we have will affect our ability to maintain a healthy food system – and for that we need major change, as the recent International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) pointed out – business as usual is not an option. In effect, we have made a massive mistake in taking the intensive fossil-fuel led approach to agricultural development and we need to take a more agro-ecological approach which needs just as smart, but different science and technology. A science that seeks to understand and work with complexity, and works with farmers to do so within an ecological framework, rather than a reductionist science that focuses narrowly on specific attributes and disciplines and is based on an economic framework totally inadequate for the task. Moreover, the direction of R&D (research and development) is being seriously distorted by the extension of rules on patents and other forms of monopoly or exclusionary privileges [misnamed intellectual property (IP) rights] into life forms and farming – which has been the quintessential disseminated open system of innovation, supported for most of the 20^th century by public good R&D.

Moreover, those firms that stand to benefit from an innovation system that privileges them through the way the IP system has developed, do not face the countervailing labelling, liability and redress requirements, and anti-trust measures, that would temper the speed with which they wish to apply their inventions in the market, seek first mover opportunities for increasing profitability and to use IP as a means to achieve and maintain market dominance. Instead, we are being led toward a model of R&D in food and farming similar to that of the marketing-based pharmaceutical industry, which fails to deliver for the diseases of poor people or which only a few suffer from.

In reality, the extension of IP rules globally through the inclusion of global minimum IP standards into the World Trade Organisation through the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) Agreement was a conservative and protectionist response by a set of industries to real technological revolutions* that means their business model is defunct and should be replaced, as discussed by Schumpeter (see for instance here).

Remember, too, that you do not have to have a correct scientific understanding of something to develop technologies that work, but sometimes we need a revolution in the history of science to conceive of new ways of engineering things – from Einstein’s insight that matter could be converted to energy, and Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA and our understanding that life – and information – is digital and can be manipulated and re-engineered as such. That leads to new technological possibilities, as does nano-tech and synthetic biology – but all new technologies are generally over-hyped and invariably have unintended consequences. Indeed, global warming is the unintended consequence of a fossil- fuel driven industrial revolution.

One of the means we’ve developed in the FEC to help think about these issues is an ethical matrix. This draws on various philosophical traditions we tend to use when thinking about what to do in terms of how it affects different groups’ wellbeing, autonomy and the justice or fairness of what is planned. It provides a means of examining the ethical positions of all interest groups – ensuring equality of treatment (justice/fairness). A very simple example is below.

An example of an ethical framework for addressing issues around food

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*See The Future Control of Food: A Guide to International Negotiations and Rules on Intellectual Property, Biodiversity and Food Security, Edited by Geoff Tansey and Tasmin Rajotte, available from Earthscan and also now freely available online in HTML and XML formats on IDRC’s website.

Geoff Tansey has worked on food, agriculture and development issues since the mid-1970s, after graduating with a BSc in Soil Science (1972) and MSc in History and Social Studies of Science (1975). In 1975, he helped found and edit the journal Food Policy, later worked on various agricultural development projects in Turkey, Mongolia, Albania and Kazakstan and was lead author of The Food System – a guide.

He has been a freelance writer, consultant, and occasional broadcaster, since the early 1980s. He has contributed features to many newspapers and magazines, various journals and books as well as written and edited a range of books.

Since the late 1990s, Geoff has worked on the impact of changing global rules on patents and other forms of intellectual property, on food, biodiversity, health and development. This has included consultancy with the UK Department for International Development, the Directorate-General for Trade of the European Commission and the Quaker International Affairs Programme (QIAP), Ottawa and Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) in Geneva.

His voluntary work includes membership of the Food Ethics Council since 2000, chairing the Food Policy Committee of the Guild of Food Writers, April 2000-April 2002, and The Food Network (formerly the Northern Food Network) from 1995 – 2000. He was co-convenor of the Conflict and Security Study Group of the Development Studies Association, 1990 – 98 and Honorary Campaigns Consultant, World Development Movement, 1989 – 94.

By Georgia Miller, Friends of the Earth Australia

A guest blog in the Alternative Perspectives on Technology Innovation series

The promise that a given new technology will deliver environmentally benign electricity too cheap to meter, end hunger and poverty, or cure disease is very seductive. That is why the claims are made with many emerging technologies – nuclear power, biotechnology and nanotechnology, to name a few.

However history shows that such optimistic predictions are never achieved in reality. In addition to benefits, new technologies come with social, economic and environmental costs, and sometimes significant political implications.

Still, when it comes to public communication or policy making about nanotechnology, we’re often presented with the limited notion of weighing up predicted ‘benefits’ versus ‘risks’ (e.g. see here, here or here).

This framing ignores the broader costs and transformative potential of new technologies. It suggests that if we can only make nanotechnology ‘safe’, its development will necessarily deliver wealth, health, social opportunities and even environmental gains.

Ensuring technology safety is clearly very important. But simply assuming that ‘safe’ technology will deliver nothing but benefits, and that these benefits will be available to everyone, is – to put it mildly – quite optimistic.

To evaluate whether or not new technologies will help or hinder efforts to address the great ecological and social challenges of our time, we need to dig a little deeper.

The first generation of nano-products on the market attests to the primacy of the profit motive in guiding nanotechnology development, rather than a quest for environmental or social utility. A quick look at the Wilson Center’s Consumer Products Inventory reveals wrinkle-disguising cosmetics, meal-replacement diet milkshakes, stain-repellent ties and high performance golf clubs.

The huge proportion of the United States government’s nanotechnology research and development budget devoted to military applications – nearly a quarter in the 2010 budget – is also as concerning as it is revealing.

But let’s just agree to take a brief flight of fancy and imagine that governments, with public funding, did want to prioritise development of environmentally and socially useful technologies.

A brief survey of the challenges confronting our 21^st century world highlights why such a decision may be warranted.

We are reaching, if not exceeding, our planet’s ecological limits. Climate change is not the only problem – water shortages, loss of arable land, pollution, deforestation, desertification and mass species extinction all point to a looming ecological crisis.

We also face an often unacknowledged justice crisis. Last year’s unprecedented global food shortages, where food riots occurred in many countries, was a stark reminder than hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest citizens struggle to meet their most basic daily needs.

How do we have a mature conversation about the role of technologies in 21^st century innovation when we’re literally at make-or-break time ecologically, and the majority world is demanding an end to gross inequity?

First of all, we’d have to go beyond a superficial tally of ‘benefits’ versus ‘risks’ of new technologies, to ask some more thoughtful and critical questions. These include questions about whether technology – and what sort of technology – could help extract us from the mess we’re in, and whether technology – and what sort of technology – will dig us further in. They would also evaluate the extent to which a technology’s actual (rather than ideal) applications will help or hinder, and the extent to which helpful applications will be accessible to those who need them. Importantly, we’d also ask how decision making about technology could be opened up to those affected – wider publics.

We would have to recognise that some of the problems we face have social or economic causes to which technological fixes are not suited. In some instances greater technical capacity – or greater accessibility of a capacity that exists elsewhere – could certainly make a useful contribution. But in other instances the adoption of new technologies could have a damaging effect.

The last forty years was a period of significant technological innovation in which microelectronics, information technologies, medical treatments, telecommunications and biotechnologies were developed, and mass air travel expanded dramatically. Technologies transformed economies, political structures and daily life for both better and worse.

In this time of rapid technological development, there were winners, losers and a new scale of environmental cost. The per capita ecological footprint of many high income countries grew. The gap between the global rich and the global poor widened.

This is not to imply that technological innovation has been the only factor driving increasing resource use and widening inequities – clearly it hasn’t; a range of social, economic and political factors are relevant. But equally clearly, rapid technological innovation has not been the answer to our global problems.

Our experience demonstrates that technological innovation will not in itself enable us to live within our means – no amount of technology delivered efficiency will enable endless economic growth on a finite planet. Nor will technology reduce the inequities that divide rich and poor – this requires social, economic and political change.

Our experience also teaches us that environmentally or socially promising technologies will not necessarily be adopted, especially if they challenge the status quo. The government of Australia, one of the sunniest countries on earth, has pledged billions of dollars to cushion the coal industry from the effects of a proposed carbon trading system, while offering scant support to the fledgling solar energy sector.

There is a tendency to focus on the potential of new technologies to address our most pressing problems, rather than to seek better deployment of existing technologies, better design of existing systems, or changes in production and consumption. This reflects a preference to avoid systemic change. It also reflects an unfounded optimism that the ‘solution’ lies just over the horizon.

But sometimes ensuring better deployment of existing technologies is the most effective way to deal with a problem. Just as wider accessibility of existing drugs and medical treatments could prevent a huge number of deaths world-wide, improving urban storm water harvesting and re-use, housing insulation and mass transit public transport could go a long way to reducing our ecological footprint – potentially at a lower cost and at lower risk than mooted high tech options.

If evaluating the implementation or performance failures of previous technologies reveals economic or social obstacles or constraints, it’s probably these factors that warrant our attention. There is no reason to believe they will magically disappear once new technologies arrive.

Technological choices have a key part to play in achieving urgently needed environmental and social change. Making the best choices that we can has never been so important. This requires us to look beyond safety to ask bigger questions about new technologies. We must ask what is required to achieve our most critical social and environmental objectives, and be willing to accept that new technology is not always the answer. We must also ask what is required to ensure that those most affected by the outcomes of technology decision making have a voice in that decision making process.

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Georgia Miller coordinates Friends of the Earth Australia’s Nanotechnology Project. Friends of the Earth is an environment and social justice NGO which has national member groups in 77 countries. Georgia is particularly interested in supporting greater public involvement in science policy development and decision making, and in making technology more responsive to social and environmental needs.

More information about FoEA’s work on nanotechnology can be found at: http://nano.foe.org.au

By Gregor Wolbring

A guest blog in the Alternative Perspectives on Technology Innovation series

First let me thank Andrew for inviting me to write a piece for his blog. Andrew states that his blog is about “how technology innovation should contribute to living in the 21st century” and about “providing a clear perspective on developing science and technology responsible”. I will focus on two aspects here. Under ‘Innovation for whom’ I look at disabled people and their visibility in the science and technology (S&T) and problem identification discourses. Under ‘innovation for what’ I look at the issue of goals and ableism.

Innovation for whom?

S&T have huge positive potential, however bringing the positive potential to fruition depends on the right social environment and foresight to identify societal and other problems, and the willingness to address them.

How do disabled people fare in a) influencing the S&T discourse and b) highlighting their problems? Science and technologies have an impact on disabled people in at least four main ways. S&T may develop tools to adapt the environment in which disabled people live and give disabled people tools that would allow them to deal with environmental challenges. This side of S&T would make the life of disabled people more livable without changing the identity and biological reality of the disabled person. S&T may develop tools that would diagnose the part of disabled people’s biological reality seen by others as deficient, defect and impaired thus allowing for preventative measures. S&T may develop tools that would eliminate that portion of disabled people’s biological reality seen by others as deficient, defect, impaired. And S&T may influence and be influenced discourses, concepts, trends and areas of action that all also impact disabled persons. However disabled people seem to be invisible in most S&T governance and priority setting discourses (e.g. see Wolbring (2007) Nano-Engagement: Some critical issues Journal of Health and Development (India) Vol. 3 No 1-2, pp. 9-29). It is in particular striking that especially disabled people who do not perceive themselves as defective are mostly absent from the nano governance and priority setting discourses. Disabled people are also not part of the geoengineering or the synthetic biology discourse. And the list can be extended. This invisibility does not only exist for disabled people but extends to many other marginalized groups.

Disabled people are also highly impacted by contemporary problems such as climate change and disaster adaptation and mitigation, access to water and sanitation, access to food, and energy and so forth and are invisible in the discourses around contemporary problems.

I highlighted for example in the 2009 paper A culture of neglect: Climate discourse and disabled people that

1. it is believed that climate change will disproportionally and differently impact disabled people;
2. the record of disaster adaptation and mitigation efforts towards disabled people is less than stellar;
3. despite the fact that other social groups such as women, children, ‘the poor’, indigenous people, farmers and displaced people are mentioned in climate related reports such as the IPCC reports and the Human Development Report 2007/2008 Fighting climate change: human solidarity in a divided world, disabled people are not mentioned in these reports although they are uniquely impacted by the problems covered and
4. the adaptation and mitigation knowledge  existing among disabled people is not mainstreamed.

I highlighted in my nano water column that the first world water report ignored the different needs and insights disabled people have with respect to water and sanitation. The third edition of the world water report published in 2009 again ignored disabled people’s needs and insights with regard to water despite mentioning other marginalized groups such as indigenous peoples, women in developing countries, the rural poor and their children.  A memorandum for a World Water Protocol (MWWP) was recently generated. It also omits the mentioning of people with disabilities. It states “Place particular emphasis on the participation, especially those groups of citizens that are under privileged, notably, women, young people and workers/peasants.”

It seems the right social environment and foresight to identify societal and other problems does not exist in regards to disabled people and many other marginalized groups.

Innovation for what?

The Converging Technologies for the European Knowledge Society (CTEK) report (PDF) states “Converging technologies are enabling technologies and knowledge systems that enable each other in the pursuit of a common goal.” If goals are the drivers what drives the generation of goals, the favouritism for certain goals? Is there a common goal?

Ableism is one concept that shapes goals people put forward and is often a goal in itself. Ableism is at the root or a major contributing factor of many societal dynamics in history, today, and very likely the future. Science and technology research and development and governance and different forms of ableism have always been and will continue to be inter-related. The desire and expectations for certain abilities led and will continue to lead to the support of science and technology research and development that promises the fulfilment of these desires and expectations. Science and technology research and development led and will continue to lead to products that enable new abilities and expectations and desires for new forms of abilities making possible new forms of ableism.

So what is it?

One form of ableism favors normative species-typical body abilities and perceives non normative ‘sub’ species-typical body abilities as a state of lesser being and is criticized by disability studies scholars for a while.  However ableism is much more ubiquitous (for online articles see here and here). “This form of ableism is a main contributor to a social dynamic that leaves disabled people invisible in many discourses and only heard in certain discourses. It promotes a “we”, “other” dynamic whereby the “we” are the  species-typical and the  “other” are the ‘sub species-typical’. In its general form, it’s a set of beliefs, processes and practices that produce a particular kind of understanding of oneself, one’s body and one’s relationship with others of one’s species, other species and one’s environment. Ableism is based on a favouritisms for certain abilities that are projected as essential by certain individuals, households, communities, groups, sectors, regions, countries and cultures which at the same time label real or perceived deviation from, or lack of these essential abilities, as a diminished state of being. Ableism exists in many forms such as biological structure based ableism, cognition based ableism, ableism inherent to a given economic system, and social structure based ableism. The favouritism of abilities contributes to other isms such as racism, sexism, cast-ism, ageism speciesism, and anti-environmentalism. Furthermore certain issues are a reflection of the desire for certain abilities such as GDP-ism, consumerism and competitiveness-ism.

If one reads the Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology, and Cognitive science Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance (NBIC) report it mentions productivity over 60 times and the term efficiency 54 times and the term competitiveness 29 times. The CTEK report states “Europe may value global competitiveness and economic growth above all else or may seek to balance it against values of social and environmental justice.”

The jury is still out which abilities we try to support with science and technology advances. We have to choose which abilities we cherish and which ableism we exhibit. I submit that the fields of Ability and Ableism ethics, studies, foresight and governance are essential lenses for responsible S&T advancement.

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Gregor Wolbring is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Community Health Science, Program in Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies. He is Affiliated Scholar, Center for Nanotechnology and Society at Arizona State University, USA; Part Time Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa Canada and Adjunct Faculty Critical Disability Studies York University, Canada. He is among others President elect of the Canadian Disability Studies Association and Chair of the Bioethics Taskforce of Disabled People’s International.

For further information, see:

Ableism and Ability Ethics and Governance blog: http://ableism.wordpress.com

The Choice is Yours column: http://www.innovationwatch.com/commentary_choiceisyours.htm

Nano Bio Info Cogno Synbio Blog: http://wolbring.wordpress.com/

What Sorts of People blog: http://whatsortsofpeople.wordpress.com/

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/12/14/wolbring/feed/ 8 http://2020science.org/2009/12/14/darnovsky/ http://2020science.org/2009/12/14/darnovsky/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:00:31 +0000 Guest http://2020science.org/?p=2545

By Marcy Darnovsky, PhD, Associate Executive Director of the Center for Genetics and Society

A guest blog in the Alternative Perspectives on Technology Innovation series

Much appreciation is due to Andrew for his courage in soliciting “alternative perspectives” on technology innovation and life in the 21st century.  I can’t help but observe that his nervousness about doing so is one small sign that something is amiss in what he calls “the interface between emerging technologies and society.”

One challenge we face in mending that interface is a tendency toward over-enthusiasm about prospective technologies. Another is the entanglement of technology innovation and commercial dynamics. Neither of these is brand new.

Back in the last century, the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair took “technological innovation” as its theme and “A Century of Progress” as its formal name. Its official motto was “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”

The slogan shamelessly depicts “science” and “industry” as dictator – or at least drill sergeant – of humanity. It anoints industrial science as a rightful decision-maker about human ends, and an inevitable purveyor of societal uplift.

Today the 1933 World’s Fair slogan seems altogether crass. But have we earned our cringe? We’d like to think that we’re more realistic about science and technology innovations. We want to believe that, in some collective sense, we’re in control of their broad direction. But are we less giddy about the techno-future now than we were back then?  Does technology innovation now serve human needs rather than the imperatives of commerce? Have we devised social and cultural innovations for shaping new technologies – do we have robust democratic mechanisms that encourage citizens and communities to participate meaningfully in decisions about their development, use and regulation?

I’m afraid that the habits of exaggerating the benefits of new technologies and minimizing their unwanted down sides are with us still. And in my view there’s huge room for improvement in our capacity for democratic governance of technology innovation.

Part of the problem is a lag in acknowledging how technology innovation now typically unfolds. Popular perceptions of scientific and technological development still feature white-coated researchers toiling late into the night for the benefit of humanity (or demented Dr. Frankensteins heedlessly pursing their own grand ambitions). To whatever extent these images may have once been realistic, they are now downright misleading. Technology innovation is increasingly dominated by large-scale commercial imperatives. Over the past century, and ever more so since the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act (an attempt to spur innovation by allowing publicly funded researchers to profit from their work), innovators have become scientist-entrepreneurs, and universities something akin to corporate incubators.

Commercial dynamics have become particularly influential in the biosciences. It’s hard to imagine any scientist today responding as Jonas Salk did in 1955, when he said with a straight face that “the people” own the polio vaccine. “There is no patent,” he told legendary news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. “Could you patent the sun?”

Of course, entrepreneurial activity in technology and science often delivers important benefits. It can bring new discoveries and techniques to fruition quickly, and make them available rapidly. Some recent commercial technologies, most notably in digital communication and computing, are stunning indeed.

But how far have we come from the slogan of the 1933 World’s Fair? Technology developers still routinely present their plans either as “inevitable” or as crucial for economic growth. As for the rest of us, we have few opportunities to deliberate – especially as citizens, but also as consumers – about the risks as well as the benefits of technology innovations. Twenty-first century societies and communities too often wind up conforming to new technologies rather than finding ways to shape their goals and direction.

In considering the future of human reproductive, genetic and related technologies (this is the major focus of my organization, the Center for Genetics and Society), the prospect of conforming to the imperatives of science and industry carries a chillingly literal implication. Scattered but persistent voices advocate that we “design” or “engineer” the traits of our children and of future generations. Some enthusiasts acknowledge that this would likely exacerbate social inequality; they recognize the very real possibility of a GATTACA-like future peopled with genetic haves and have-nots. But they remain gung-ho. Others fail to challenge such visions on the shaky libertarian grounds that an individual’s choice to alter the human species should trump commitments to social justice and human rights.

Fortunately, these are minority views.  Inheritable genetic modification is opposed by large majorities in opinion surveys, and has been formally rejected in the laws of nearly 50 countries. Unfortunately, there is no such policy in the U.S. Nor does the U.S. meaningfully regulate assisted reproductive technologies as other industrial democracies do.

What’s needed now is a new kind of biopolitical thinking. Toward that end, here are five principles that I believe should inform deliberation about innovation in human biotechnologies (and other major technologies as well):

• First, let’s acknowledge that the practices and products of science are inherently political [PDF]. They affect us collectively, shaping our communities and the larger world we share. That inescapable fact makes it legitimate—in fact obligatory—to subject powerful new technologies, including human biotech and related emerging technologies, to social negotiation and, when appropriate, to responsible control.

• Second, we need systematic, inclusive, and robust public conversations about the consequences of technology innovations and the values they support or undermine. This is especially challenging for reproductive and genetic technologies because of Americans’ strongly divergent views about beginning-of-life matters. If we can establish habits of thoughtful deliberation about these technologies, we’d have taken a big step forward.

• Third, the known and potential social consequences of technology innovations – not just their safety and efficacy – should be systematically included in our evaluations. We should particularly assess their impacts on socially and economically vulnerable populations.

• Fourth, we should draw on the lessons of previous efforts by socially concerned scientists and their supporters—the “atomic scientists,” environmentalists, public health advocates, and others—to safeguard human health and the environment, bolster responsible science, and build a more just society. We should be skeptical of technological fixes for social problems, and of innovations that serve elite groups rather than the public interest and the common good.

• Fifth, we should acknowledge that market mechanisms are not a substitute for public policy, and affirm the legitimacy and urgency of democratic oversight of major technology innovations, including human biotechnologies. As we would in other arenas, we should avoid regulatory capture, eliminate conflicts of interest, and maximize transparency, accountability, and wide participation in policy making.

The good news is that a new approach to biopolitics is taking shape, one that supports technology innovation when it serves human needs and socially defined goals, and when its broad directions are shaped by democratic governance. A growing network of civil society leaders, public intellectuals, and scientists is taking on the challenge. Contact CGS for more information.

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Marcy Darnovsky, PhD, is Associate Executive Director at the Center for Genetics and Society, a Berkeley, California-based public affairs organization working to encourage responsible uses and effective societal governance of reproductive and genetic biotechnologies.

More information:

Center for Genetics and Society www.geneticsandsociety.org

Biopolitical Times www.biopoliticaltimes.org

More about the guidelines for 21^st-century biopolitics:

“Political Science: Progressives can’t—and shouldn’t—remove politics and values from science,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Summer 2009 http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6700

2020 Science is something of a labor of love – it’s a website where I explore my thoughts and ideas surrounding the interface between science, technology and society beyond the constraints of my “day job” (currently Chief Science Advisor to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center).  I like to think I bring a balanced and, on a good day, sophisticated perspective to the stuff I write about.  So I was intrigued and just a little taken aback when Jim Thomas at ETC Group, recently pointed out that, actually, I’m quite obviously flying the flag for the established pro-technology innovation camp.

Jim was right – up to a point.  I do adhere to the “ideology” that if we are to survive the future, we need to get a lot smarter in how we develop and use technology.  But I also hope that I’m aware enough to recognize that there are other very different, but equally legitimate, perspectives on the role of technology innovation in society.  So this got me thinking – maybe I should invite a group of people with a range of different perspectives on tech innovation to write a series of guest blogs on the subject.  I’d find it useful.  But more importantly, I think people reading this blog would find it useful.

After speaking to a few friends within the Civil Society community (including NGOs like ETC Group, NRDC and Friends of the Earth), the idea took shape:  I would dedicate a week’s worth of blog space to ten different thought-leaders, asking each of them to address a single question:

“How should technology innovation contribute to life in the 21^st century?”

With no editorial control from me (bar framing the question), and a few simple guidelines on length and style, my hope was that this would provide something of a unique perspective on the role of technology innovation in society – including its potential downsides – and demonstrate that the future depends on responding to and working with many value systems, not just the apparently prevalent ones.

I should in all honesty point out that the thought of handing over the blog to a bunch of NGOs for the week scared the life out of me.  As it turns out, the process has been overwhelmingly positive.  Not only did these writers from a range of organizations graciously agree to write for the blog – they produced articles that without exception inform, challenge and enlighten.

The series starts next Monday (Dec 14) and ends on Dec 18.  Each day, I will be posting two guest blogs from the series; one in the morning, one in the afternoon.  The complete lineup can be found here.

Do look out for them and read them – they all well worth the time.  I don’t expect everyone will agree with everything that’s written – that’s OK.  But do me a favor – if you don’t agree (or even if you do, or have additional points you would like to make or questions you would like to ask), please do add comments to the blogs – that’s what the “Leave a Comment” box is there for!

With that, all that remains is for me to thank my ten guest bloggers – who without exception the gave of their time and energy with great generosity, and far exceeded my expectations.  Thank you.

__________________________

The ten guest bloggers are:

Marcy Darnovsky, Center for Genetics & Society

Gregor Wolbring, University of Calgary

Georgia Miller, Friends of the Earth

Geoff Tansey, Food Ethics Council

Jen Sass, Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC)

Richard Owen, University of Westminster

Richard Worthington, Loka

George Kimbrell, International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA)

Tim Jackson, University of Surrey

Jim Thomas, ETC Group

See the full series details at “Technology innovation, life, and the 21st century – ten alternative perspectives“

Update, 12/15/09 – Richard Owen was added as a late substitution for Debra Harry

The final part of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21^st century

Nine months ago, I embarked on an ambitious project to flesh out the ideas presented in a seminar given at the James Martin 21st Century School at the University of Oxford.  The seminar was titled ““Rethinking science and technology innovation: A Personal Perspective.”  In it, I spoke about three factors that are coming together to change the landscape in which science and technology are developed and used for social good (coupling, communication and control), and how science and technology policy might respond to the new challenges that are arising as a consequence.

Rather naively, I thought this would occupy me for a few weeks.  The fact that I gave the original seminar in March, and I’m typing this in December, is a rather damning testament to my own lack of foresight!

Finally though, I have come to the end of the series.  I’m not sure how useful it has been or whether it will stand the test of time – there are certainly a lot of words within the eleven blogs associated with it, but whether they coalesce into new and worthwhile ideas is another matter entirely.  However, it has   helped me explore more thoroughly some of the concepts that drove the original seminar, and further develop my thoughts on science and technology might play in the 21st century.

The complete blog series can be accessed from here.  It addresses the critical roles science and technology will increasingly play in society over the coming decades; the challenges of getting science and technology-based strategies and policies right; and thoughts on how to respond to these challenges – leading to a future where science and technology are used for good, rather than leading to harm.

I’m not going to attempt to summarize the series here – a pretty succinct precis of the challenges and opportunities we face can be found in this post if you are interested.  Rather, I wanted to round the series off by ruminating more broadly and speculatively on the future challenges and opportunities we face.

First though, something of a confession: I’m a believer in science and technology.  I use the “B” word advisedly – I’m not sure I could prove unequivocally that science and technology innovation lead to people and communities being happier, more fulfilled, or having a greater “quality of life.”  But as a scientist, I can see how science and technology provide the means to alleviate suffering, improve health and well-being, and help define who we are.  I also see a society that is built on a foundation of science and technology and that is unavoidably and irreversibly dependent on them.  And as I gaze into my (admittedly murky) crystal ball, I find it hard to conceive of a future where science and technology are not essential to maintaining and improving people’s lives around the world.

But herein lies a challenge – if we are dependent on science and technology, how do we ensure that this dependency works for us, rather than against us?  We’ve spent the past several millennia grappling with this question, not always successfully.  But in the past, the rates of science discovery and technology advance have typically taken place over timescales that have allowed us to adapt (eventually) to the changes they bring about.

Entering the 21st century, all this is changing.  Science and technology are now progressing so fast that we are struggling to adapt to one set of breakthroughs before the next comes along – and the rate at “progress” is being made is accelerating.  Intertwined with this are the three factors of coupling, communication and control that are leading to challenges and opportunities never before experienced in human history.

From where I’m standing, it’s hard to imagine how we can ride the coming wave without a radical rethink of how we develop and use science and technology within society.    Certainly, it seems hopelessly naive to assume that how we’ve done things in the past will serve us well in the future.  Rather, we’ve got to grow up as a global society – and grow up fast – if we are to ensure science and technology improve our lives and those of future generations, rather than causing more problems than they solve.

In this series of articles, I’ve sketched out my own thoughts on where the challenges are, and where some of the solutions might lie.  They are rough, ill-formed and sometimes naive – this is very much a work in progress.  Yet hopefully they provide some kernels of value as we begin to face address challenges that are very much unique to our generation.

Having said this, I must end on a note of caution.  I am a science and technology optimist, but a cautious one.  I genuinely believe that science and technology – if developed and used appropriately – are critical to addressing the challenges of living and thriving in an increasingly complex and resource-constrained world.  But that’s my belief; it’s not a universal truth. At the end of the day, if we are to mature as a global society, we’re going to need to listen to other perspectives that maybe don’t see the world in the same way, and take full account of them as we rethink science and technology for the 21st century.

And rather conveniently, that’s the focus of the next blog series on 2020 Science.

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/12/09/science-and-technology-innovation-looking-to-the-future/feed/ 1 http://2020science.org/2009/12/07/completing-the-circle-coupling-science-technology-outputs-to-inputs/ http://2020science.org/2009/12/07/completing-the-circle-coupling-science-technology-outputs-to-inputs/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:45:57 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=2525

Part 9 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21^st century

Writing about completing the circle of science and technology policy at the start of the Copenhagen climate summit seems particularly fitting.  Although the climate change context was far from my mind when I started this series, it stands as a stark reminder of the consequences of unconstrained science and technology, the possibilities of using science and technology to create a better future, and the daunting complexities of crafting policies that get us as a society to where we want to be.

Whether it’s dealing with climate change or innumerable other issues, the way we develop and use science and technology needs to be responsive to the challenges we face as a society, and the social, political and economic environment within which we face them.  Simply funding scientists to do what takes their fancy isn’t likely to deliver the goods in a world increasingly dominated by the three C’s – Communication, Control and Coupling.  Yet heavy-handed control of the science agenda is clearly not the answer—autonomy and open-ended research are essential to scientific discovery and innovation.

So what’s the answer?  How do we ensure our investment in science and technology as a society achieves what we believe it should, without over-indulging a science elite, or stifling discovery and innovation?  At the end of the last blog in this series I suggested that we need increased feedback in the policy process to make it work better.

Feedback loops take some of the output of a process and feed it back into the input – they’re a way of regulating a process so that it remains responsive, and doesn’t get out of control.  Of course, the business of policy is full of feedback loops.  In fact the whole political process can be seen as one rather large feedback loop – unpopular leaders and decisions usually end up being overturned, although sometimes the “time constants” are rather long.  The next two weeks in Copenhagen is a prime example of feedback in policy-making – even if this is a feedback loop with a rather large time constant.

However just because feedback mechanisms exist doesn’t mean that they are as effective as they could be…

In part 8 of this series, I proposed two feedback loops in particular that will become increasingly important to developing more responsive science and technology policy: Review and Participation.

The Review loop should be reasonably clear: It deals with comparing the actual impact of policy decisions with the intended impact, and adjusting the inputs to realign the outcomes.  This might mean altering the original goals, increasing (or even decreasing) the resources made available for specific areas, or changing the mechanisms by which those resources are used (for example).  It seems obvious, but it isn’t often done that well in practice.  There’s a fine line between too little and too much feedback, or feedback that’s fast but ill-informed and feedback that’s comprehensive but interminable!  Yet if we don’t get this balance right, it will be near-impossible to craft policies that respond to the ever-accelerating opportunities and challenges presented by 21^st century science and technology.

The Participation loop on the other hand may not be quite so clear.  This arises in to a large degree from one of the three “C’s” – communication – but is also driven by the other two – control and coupling.

Old-style “command and control” approaches to policy haven’t a hope of working in tomorrow’s hyper-connected world.  Through rapid and radical advances in global communication, people have become an inextricable part of the decision-making process – as a society, we now have a louder voice than ever before.  Policy makers can either fight this, or embrace it.

Integrating the participation of individuals and groups with a stake in science and technology into the policy process is a pragmatic necessity.  These are the people who will be affected by the outcomes of decisions made by governments, and who will become increasingly vocal – and influential – if they don’t like those decisions.  They are also a potential force for positive change – by listening to the “consumers” of science and technology, it becomes possible to craft policies which address their actual wants and needs, rather than making assumptions on their behalf.

There is also an ethical dimension here – to what extent is it appropriate for an elite handful of decision-makers to decide what is good for the masses?  Certainly, where highly complex information needs to be understood, interpreted and acted on, expert input is needed.  But broader decisions on the relevance and implications of science and technology should arguably involve the people (and organizations) who stand to benefit or suffer as a result of them.

So what are the keys and consequences to developing (or further developing) these two feedback loops?

When I gave the original lecture on which these notes are based, I identified three action-areas that will both help establish the loops, and ensure their effectiveness: empowerment, engagement and evaluation.

Empowering stakeholders

Neither of these two feedback loops will work if people and organizations are not empowered to become effective stakeholders.  This goes for expert stakeholders as well as lay stakeholders (which in most cases is people like you and me).  However, the challenges to empowering each group are different.

Lay stakeholders need to be provided with the ability to deal with the complexities of modern science and technology – and not to be intimidated by them.  Critical thinking is essential here – people need to be enabled to make sense of information, and separate out what is more important from what is less significant.  Information also needs to be accessible – in its original form (predominantly as peer reviewed publications), in non-expert syntheses, and in appropriate media coverage (and I’m including blogs here).  And importantly, the consequences of science and technology-related decisions need to be conveyed to non-expert stakeholders.  Even though many people struggle to understand the principles behind modern science and technology, most can grasp what it means to them personally if it is explained well.

Expert stakeholders on the other hand need to learn to communicate effectively, if they are to play their part in these feedback loops.  And critically, they need to learn to listen – to understand what the questions are, before providing answers.

Engaging stakeholders

This is a huge subject, worthy of several blog sites on its own (many of which already exist), and there is no way I can do it justice in a few sentences.  Yet looking at stakeholder engagement from the perspective of the two feedback loops being discussed, four points are worth highlighting:

First is the need for public discourse.  Without this, how will people know what is going on in science and technology, how it will affect them, and how they can play a part in shaping their future?  This leads directly into participation in decision-making.  Public engagement is not about communication, education or persuasion – it is about making people an integral part of the policy process – providing them with a seat at the table, where they will be listened to and taken seriously.

Effective public discourse and engagement will only be possible though if science is more completely integrated into society.  Rather than being seen as someone else’s problem, science in the 21^st century needs to be seen as everyone’s “problem.”  This will need some cultural changes if progress is to be made, from addressing educators who can’t see the point of science, to tackling politicians and public figures that undermine it, to dealing with scientists who strive to maintain their self-allotted place at the top of the intellectual pyramid.  But without changing the culture that determines science’s place within society, it will remain the realm of the elite.  And in a world increasingly dependent on science and technology, this can only lead to a Technocracy – in spirit, if not in name.

One possible approach to increasing the level of science and technology engagement is to build science and technology constituencies – groups of people with a vested interest in seeing science and technology developed and used effectively in specific areas.  The idea comes from medical research, where highly vocal involvement from non-expert stakeholders can have a huge influence on research investment, direction and application.

This approach is fraught with difficulties – the possibilities for ill-informed decisions are rife when poorly informed groups lobby for narrow areas of research to take a specific course.  But putting that aside, it’s intriguing to ask what would happen if communities were energized to be a part of research initiatives into areas like clean energy, water access, transport, food production?  What if passive lay “stakeholders” were given the opportunity to be active stakeholders, who could see a direct return on their investment in supporting and being a part of research initiatives that meant something to them?

Science and technology constituencies are a potentially dangerous idea – they take power away from the established elite for a start.  But it’s an intriguing concept nevertheless, and one that should probably be explored further.

(Re)Evaluating drivers, mechanisms and policies.

Finally, what’s the relevance of these feedback loops to people in a position to review and influence policy decisions?

In my original lecture, I highlighted three areas that policy makers and research funders should be focusing on: challenge-informed science, new knowledge stimulation, and knowledge-coupling.

Challenge-informed science. This is a bit of a hot potato.  The question of how you strike a balance between so-called blue skies research and applied research has vexed the science community for years, and at times has become extremely heated.  But rather than argue for one or the other, I would reframe the question and ask “how can we best develop science and technology policies that are socially relevant?”

Science for its own sake is essential – as I explain below.  But policy makers are accountable for how they spend a limited pot of public money.  For instance, if a country or region is facing challenges that will impact severely on peoples’ lives and livelihoods, and that could be alleviated through strategic investment in science and technology, it is hard for policy makers to argue for the bulk of science funding to go towards research that is irrelevant, which may serendipitously lead to some solutions to some future challenges, or which will lead to relevant knowledge but too late to be of any use.

Of course, the counter-argument is that it is naïve to assume that science and technology can be coerced into providing rapid solutions to challenges.  I would agree with this.  Yet at the same time, it is entirely possible for science and technology to be framed and guided—informed—by challenges (and opportunities) that society is facing now, or is likely to face in the future.  This doesn’t preclude blue skies research – but it does increase the chances of science and technology leading to socially relevant solutions.

And it should never be forgotten that practicing science is not an inalienable right – scientists (and technologists and engineers) and ultimately accountable to their patrons – who in this day and age tend to be their fellow citizens.

New Knowledge stimulation. So where does that leave blue skies research?  I would argue that there is always a justification for supporting open ended, exploratory research for three reasons:  It enriches society through raising our awareness of who we are and the universe we live in; it leads to serendipitous discovery; and it lays a foundation on which more applied research and technology innovation can be built.  It is essential to the science enterprise.  The only question is where the balance between open ended and ends-justified research should be.

I would argue that blue skies research should not dominate science and technology, except where there is a strong and specific argument for it to do so (the mega-expensive Large Hadron Collider comes to mind, where progress can only be made with substantial investment and little promise of practical return).  I would also suggest that it should be led by the most able researchers—those most capable of pushing the boundaries of knowledge.  And it should still be held accountable – even if this means communicating the more metaphysical and philosophical impacts of the work.  Blue skies research should never be a free ticket for researchers to do what they want at someone else’s expense.

Knowledge coupling. “Interdisciplinary research” is a buzz phrase that has been around for decades – often as a means of winning grants, which are then used for anything but true interdisciplinary research.  Yet it’s hard to deny that some of the more significant advances in science and technology occur at the intersections between different areas of expertise.  And it’s not only when researchers work between different scientific disciplines that innovation occurs – collaborations between scientists and engineers, social scientists, experts in the humanities and others are proving to be equally profitable.

What we are seeing is the effect of “knowledge coupling” – ensuring knowledge can flow between different fields of expertise with ease, leading to new ideas, new avenues of research and, ultimately, new advances in science and technology.  This seems to be a more useful concept than “interdisciplinary research” as it captures the essence of how knowledge and information lead to discovery, innovation and progress.  The more we can remove barriers to this cross-disciplinary, cross-expertise and cross-sector flow of knowledge, the better we will be at both stimulating new science, and using it effectively.

Pulling it all together

Developing and using science and technology effectively in the 21^st century will not be easy.  Increasingly, we’re facing “wicked problems” – problems that many stakeholders are interested in, but which remain elusive and ill-defined.  Science and technology are leading to some of these problems, but they also hold the keys to solving them – but only if we learn to use them wisely and effectively.  Integral to this process is getting the policy framework right, so that informed and effective decisions can be made.  And this in turn will depend on how the outcomes of the science and technology enterprise are fed back into the inputs – leading to policies that are responsive and effective.

As scientists, leaders, decision-makers, lobbyists and others gather in Copenhagen over the next two weeks, it will be an interesting test of how effectively science and technology policy are serving society, and how far we still have to go if we are to rise to the emerging challenges of the 21^st century.  Will we see the “nasty brutish debate with science caught somewhere in the middle” predicted by Tim Harper, or will a more mature and enlightened approach emerge?

I suspect Tim is right on this one, but hopefully he isn’t – because more than ever before we need to get science and technology right if we are to deal with the opportunities and challenges that Coupling, Communication and Control are going to throw our way over the coming decades.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.

Previously: Riding the wave: Rethinking science & technology policy

Next: Science and Technology Innovation – looking to the future

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/12/07/completing-the-circle-coupling-science-technology-outputs-to-inputs/feed/ 0 http://2020science.org/2009/11/22/whats-emerging-technology-got-to-do-with-it/ http://2020science.org/2009/11/22/whats-emerging-technology-got-to-do-with-it/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:00:31 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=2437

As this weekend’s Summit on the Global Agenda came to a close this morning, I was left with an abiding impression of a looming yet largely hidden potential crisis in global security and prosperity: A failure to develop and use technology innovation effectively in serving the growing needs of society.

The summit set out to address a multitude of challenges to “improving the state of the world” (as the World Economic Forum tagline goes), and identified many innovative solutions to overcoming them.  Yet in many cases there was a disconnect between the ideas and their effective implementation…

Where the translation of an idea into practice depended on social or policy innovation, there were often clear thoughts on how to move forward.  But an integrated discussion on the role of technology innovation in enabling solutions to global challenges was conspicuous by its absence.

It wasn’t that delegates didn’t realize the importance of technology innovation.  On the contrary, many of the recommendations coming out of the Summit acknowledged the need to develop and use appropriately new and emerging technologies.  But there was a sense that technology innovation simply happens and that, as needs arise, solutions will naturally emerge.

I was reminded of this while listening to feedback from the Council on Water Security, whose members experienced a similar lack of awareness amongst Summit delegates.  When they asked people where the water would come from to support their ideas in various areas, the reply was inevitably “I guess it will come from somewhere” – to the amusement and consternation of the Council members.

The same blind spot seems to exist for technology innovation.  People realize that technology innovation is important. But when asked where it will come from, the assumption is simply that “it will come from somewhere.”

This is as dangerous as it is wrong.

Strategically relevant technology does not just happen.  It depends on targeted investment, coupling outputs to needs, and working with stakeholders to develop and implement appropriate and acceptable solutions.  And it takes time – lost of it.  Developing appropriate technology-based solutions to global challenges is only possible if  technology innovation policy is integrated into the decision-making process at the highest levels in government, industry and other relevant organizations.  Without such high-level oversight, there is a tendency to use the technology that’s available, rather than to develop the technology that’s needed.  And as the challenges of living in an over-populated and under-resourced world escalate, this will only exacerbate the disconnect between critical challenges and technology-based solutions.

The importance of technology innovation – and emerging technologies in particular – was highlighted by Lord Malloch-Brown in his closing remarks at this year’s Summit on the Global Agenda.  Yet there is still a way to go before technology innovation is integrated into the global agenda dialogue, rather than being tacked on to it.

At this year’s Summit, there was one Council out of seventy six that was specifically charged with addressing technology innovation – the Council on Emerging Technologies.  And in a move that speaks volumes about the economic and policy world’s disdain for science and technology, the Council was placed in the “Managing Global Risks and Addressing Systemic Failures” cluster.  Clearly, emerging technologies are perceived more as a threat than an enabler of solutions.

If progress is to be made, this must change in future years.  Technology innovation is key to improving the state of the world.  And getting it right – targeting research, translating innovation to practice and engaging stakeholders – is essential to addressing many of the major challenges being addressed by the Summit on the Global Agenda.  Rather than burying the Council on Emerging Technologies along with catastrophic risks, illicit trade, pandemics and other risk-focused councils, it surely makes sense to elevate it – along with other science and technology-rich councils – to a place where it can inform the dialogue at a much higher level.

Of course, I’m mindful here that this is the World Economic Forum I’m talking about, not the World Technology Innovation Forum.  But the cold hard truth is that without global intervention, there is no guarantee that technology innovation will provide solutions to the challenges that the Forum is attempting to address.

The bottom line is that whether we are talking about economic prosperity, social stability or personal well-being, we marginalize the role of technology innovation at our peril.  The broader work of the World Economic Forum reflects this.  Hopefully, so will next year’s Summit on the Global Agenda.

Good brainstorms are oft anticipated and rarely encountered.  So I tend to get a little excited when I find myself in one that stimulates rather than stultifies.

Today at the World Economic Forum Summit on the Global Agenda had more than it’s fair share of frustrations – including what I can only describe as a masterful demonstration in the art of assisted group-think entropy (sense in, nonsense out). But rather than moan about the negatives, I want to emphasize one of the highlights of the meeting – the Global Agenda Council Fair.

The Global Agenda Council Fair is the part of the Summit where attendees are free to roam amongst the 76 councils, talking about common interests and sparking new ideas off other delegates.  For me it’s like being a kid in a candy store – a chance to dip into seventy-six groups of people ready and willing to discuss everything from the Climate Change to the Future of Entertainment.  Sadly, with only an hour or so available and an Emerging Technologies agenda to follow, I had to restrict myself to two Councils today.  But it was still a lot of fun – and very worthwhile.

So let me give you a flavor of how things worked.

The first group I visited was the Catastrophic Risks Council.  When I arrived, there was a discussion in full flow about the need to get a handle on distinguishing more likely/higher impact global catastrophic risks from those less likely to happen or cause serious harm.  A more rational approach to risk identification and action – it was being argued – would help channel resources to where they could be used most effectively, while reducing anxiety from unwarranted speculation.  The solution – a World Risk Organization.

I had come to the group in part to talk about a proposal from my own Council on a new global center to inform policies on developing safe, sustainable and successful emerging technologies, and was immediately struck by how well the two ideas meshed together.  Emerging technologies have the potential to create serious problems if not developed appropriately.  Yet they also provide possible solutions to dealing with problems from other sources.  By taking an informed approach to weighing potential risks and benefits and taking action, I could see how the two ideas could be highly complimentary.

At this point, a delegate from the International Legal System Council entered the booth.  And the immediate reaction to the idea of a World Risk Organization?  “How about the risk-equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?”

It transpired that the International Legal System Council had been working on the idea of an Intergovernmental Panel on Global Risks.

Who would have thought there would be such synergy between catastrophic risks, emerging technologies and international legal systems!

The second group I visited was the Food Security Council.  Here the discussion was a little more diffuse, but stimulating nevertheless.  The idea of using mobile phones and cellular networks to monitor and treat crops came up as an innovative intersection between emerging technologies and ensuring good food production.  It’s not a new idea, but it is a great example of how new technologies can have unexpected benefits – if accompanied by some creative lateral thinking.

More interesting was a discussion about identifying counterfeit pesticides and fertilizers.  A delegate from the Illicit Trade Council had raised the issue of how important it is to track the origin of food products, preventing illicit – and potentially harmful – products from entering the food chain.  This led to an observation that counterfeit fertilizers and pesticides are a serious problem in some developing economies.  Not only do they undermine legitimate trade, but they often jeopardize the health and safety of crops – with serious consequences to communities that rely on them.  Apparently though – and this was news to me – the origins of fertilizers and pesticides in developing economies are often hard to identify.

There was a clear link here with the potential use of emerging technologies for enabling cost-effective and robust tagging of legitimate products.  Using advances in complex chemicals, engineered nanomaterials or bioengineering, it should be possible to develop new ways to ensure the quality of agricultural products – supporting higher quality and higher volume crop yields, and improving the health and lives of people dependent on them.

In the space of an hour I had learned some new stuff, added value to other people’s concepts, and started formulating some new ideas of my own.  And this was happening all around me – 700 people being exposed to dangerously high levels of mental stimulation!

For me, this was a highlight of today’s sessions.  Okay so the two-hour meeting on reducing ten sharp ideas to eight woolly ones was a little tedious, and working out what we were supposed to be doing was challenging at times.  But the sheer enjoyment and serendipity of the Council Fair more than made up for these.

The challenge now is seeing whether any of those sparks can be coaxed into a fully fledged fire!

It’s the end of day one at the World Economic Forum Summit on the Global Agenda, and I’m sitting in my rather comfortable hotel room overlooking Palm Island, trying to pull my thoughts together. It was a day for meeting old friends, making new acquaintances, listening to stirring speeches and exploring new challenges.  As you would expect from a 700 person-strong brainstorm, there were moments of disorientation and confusion.  But even these were stimulating in their own way – rather cleverly, the World Economic Forum has orchestrated a setting where serendipity becomes commonplace.

The real meat of the Summit begins tomorrow, when we start to swap ideas with other Global Agenda Councils (last year I spent an enjoyable hour talking about nanotechnology with the Council on Faith – not what I set out to do, but it’s these chance encounters that bring considerable added value to the Summit).  Today was more of a consolidation exercise – getting to grips with the areas that the Emerging Technologies Council will be focusing on over the next 12 months.

In our discussions, one topic came up that intrigued me – to the point that I made the mistake of suggesting I might follow up on it.  In talking about the role of technology innovation in society, we got onto the question of how technology innovation can enable social innovation.  As I suspect I will be expected to report back on this at some point, I thought I would start feeling out one or two ideas in today’s blog from the Summit.

The role of technology innovation in social innovation undoubtedly has a rich literature (although a quick Google search doesn’t reveal that much) – one which, I must confess, is beyond my reach sitting here at the end of a long, jet-lagged day.  But I do want to get a few thoughts down for further exploration regardless.

Much of the science and technology policy in the developed world is hooked on the idea of the technology fix: Got a problem – technology innovation can solve it.  I must confess, the idea (in a rather more sophisticated form) influences a lot of my thinking.  But this isn’t the only way of viewing the world.  There are those who argue that addressing some challenges will depend on social – not technological – innovation.  Advocating for lower energy use over better energy sources is one example.  Pushing for practices that reduce carbon dioxide emissions rather than relying on climate engineering to “fix” global warming is another.

Challenges like energy generation, access to clean water, hunger and poverty are often held up as problems requiring technology-based solutions.  But they are also challenges that can be addressed – in part at least – through social innovation.  In fact, the argument that long-term solutions will depend on social change  in these areas is a pretty compelling one.

But this begs the question – can technology innovation be used to enable social innovation that leads to change?

Looking back over history, the answer seems to be yes.  The agricultural revolution enabled profound social changes, allowing stable communities to develop and freeing people to think about more than simply where the next mouthful of food was coming from.  The scientific revolution of the enlightenment transformed people’s understanding of the world and their place in it, and changed society as a result.  The industrial revolution laid the groundwork for today’s affluent first-world societies.

Of course, it can be argued that these technological innovations merely drove social change, rather than enabling social innovation, although I suspect the line between the two is more than a little blurred. But recent history seems to throw up numerous specific examples of technology innovation enabling social innovation – mobile phones connecting communities and providing access to expertise, low power LED lighting supporting increased literacy in developing economies, and social media building virtual communities that transcend geographical and political boundaries for example.

These and other examples suggest that, even when social innovation is important to addressing key challenges, emerging technologies can have a significant role to play in supporting it – technology innovation becomes an enabler of solutions, rather than a solution in and of itself.

But if this is the case, it makes sense to work out how best to use technology in this way, rather than leaving things to chance.

So these are the question that today’s discussions have lodged in my mind:  How can technology innovation be nurtured to provide tools that enable social innovation?  What are the key areas in which technology innovation has the potential to empower social innovation?  And how is the technology fix best balanced against the technology-enabled fix?

I see I’m going to have a restless night!

For the next three days I will be participating in and blogging from the World Economic Forum Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai.  If last year’s summit – described as the “World’s largest brainstorming” – is anything to go by, we’re in for an intense few days.  The summit draws on the WEF’s Global Agenda Councils, and creates a forum for over 700 thought-leaders representing over 90 countries to mix and match ideas on issues as diverse as catastrophic global risks to the role of faith in society, and sustainable consumption to the future of entertainment.

This year, the Summit is focused on contributing to the World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative (GRI) – a multistakeholder dialogue addressing the challenges of the 21st century. Tapping into expertise within industry, governmental, civil society, academic and media communities, the GRI is addressing six themes:

1. Creating a Values Framework considers the universal values needed for constructive coexistence in an interdependent world characterized by cultural diversity.
2. Mitigating Global Risks and Addressing Systemic Failures – includes all eventualities and risks which may have adverse consequences on a global level.
3. Strengthening Economies encompasses all aspects of economic growth and development.
4. Enhancing Security speaks to the need for global, national and human security.
5. Ensuring Sustainability addresses human behaviour in the global ecosystem.
6. Building Effective Institutions reflects on the necessary institutional context for effective global governance.

Discussions over the next three days will revolve around these themes, as well as feeding directly into the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters.

Last year, I found it intriguing and more than a little worrying that, while many of the issues being addressed by the Global Agenda Councils depend on science and technology innovation, science and technology were not central to the discussions.  Hopefully this year will see a shift in emphasis.  The good news is that we now have a Council on Emerging Technologies (which I participate in), which will be working with a number of other Councils to help establish science and technology-grounded discussions.

Whether or not we achieve as much integration as I would like remains to be seen.  Either way, if last year was anything to go by, we’re in for a stimulating, challenging and exciting few days.  I must confess, I get a tremendous buzz out of dropping in on intense conversations in areas I know nothing about, with experts I would normally never cross paths with – and experiencing the mental light bulbs flash on as we compare notes and exchange ideas.  And with 700 smart people cloistered together for three days, I can guarantee there are going to be a lot of bulbs lighting up in Dubai this weekend.

Of course, the location helps – but it’s the people that matter.  Really…

If all goes according to plan, I’ll be posting each day between now and Sunday November 22nd on how the Summit’s going from my perspective, so stay tuned.

First thought I have to get there.

Signing off from JFK, waiting for the flight out to Dubai.

This is a first for 2020 Science – a plug for a meeting which I have nothing to do with!  But next month’s seminar on the Biopolitics of Popular Culture being run by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) looks so intriguing that I couldn’t resist! (that, and a heads-up from IEET Managing Director Mike Treder )

First though, a word on that term “biopolitics.”  Biopolitics is a rather versatile concept that embraces a whole raft of stuff – from politics of bioethics through the use of biotechnology to human enhancement (check this overview out if you really want your brain scrambled).  But there seems to be some convergence on the idea of biopolitics as grappling with the tough questions that arise at the intersection of emerging technologies and life.

In other words, how do we handle new technologies that could profoundly and intimately alter who we are and what we can do as a species?

When Jeff Goldblum’s character in the movie Jurassic Park came out with the line “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” he was echoing a long-running debate on who decides how science is used.  As the rate of scientific discovery and technology innovation accelerates, this question is becoming increasingly relevant, and is central it seems to biopolitics.

But biopolitics is also being driven by another factor – imagination.

Imagination drives the vision of scientists underpinning emerging technologies – it’s the ever-present “what if…” of the consummate researcher.  It drives the promoters of emerging technologies – selling dreams of Utopian futures enabled by revolutionary breakthroughs.  And it fuels the aspirations and fears of people who stand to benefit or suffer from technological advancements – turning technological possibilities into imagined probabilities that end up influencing lives in complex ways.

And here you have the link with popular culture.

To quote the introduction to the IEET seminar,

Our most transcendent expectations for technology come from pop culture, and the most common objections to emerging technologies come from science fiction and horror, from Frankenstein and Brave New World to Gattaca and the Terminator.

Why is it that almost every person in fiction who wants to live a longer than normal life is evil or pays some terrible price? What does it say about attitudes towards posthuman possibilities when mutants in Heroes or the X-Men, or cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica or Iron Man, or vampires in True Blood or Twilight are depicted as capable of responsible citizenship?

Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?

It’s this interplay between popular imagination, technology development and – for want of a better word – “biopolitics” that I find fascinating.  And to explore it, IEET have lined up an equally fascinating group of people – including Annalee Newitz (editor of Science Fiction blog io9), David Brin (scientist and best-selling author), Natasha Vita-More (pioneer of transhumanists aesthetics) and Jamais Cascio (futurist), along with may others.

Sadly, I won’t be around in Irvine CA on December 4, and so will miss the fun.  But if you are even remotely interested in the intersection between popular culture and future technologies, this seems to be a meeting worth checking out – more details here.

As scientists, how we love to rail against the incompetence of the media.  As self-proclaimed keepers of the truth, we decry – usually rather vocally – the misinterpretation and misuse of our precious studies.  And as we commiserate together on the injustices of the world, we inevitably get to thinking that if only journalists could see the world as we do and get that down in writing (or on tape), things would be so much better.

Except, it isn’t always the journalists who are to blame for how science is portrayed in the media!

Take this case that landed in my metaphorical in-tray this morning for instance:

Yesterday, Texas A&M University put out a news item with the title “Technology may cool the laptop.” The piece starts:

Does your laptop sometimes get so hot that it can almost be used to fry eggs? New technology may help cool it and give information technology a unique twist, says Jairo Sinova, a Texas A&M University physics professor.

Aided by a short video, Professor Sinova, a co-author on the research being referred to, notes that

Laptops are getting increasingly powerful, but as their sizes are getting smaller they are heating up, so how to deal with excessive heat becomes a headache… “Theoretically, excessive heat may melt the laptop,” he adds. “This also wastes a considerable amount of energy.”

This is an important issue, although I suspect that the vision of melting laptops goes a little far.  But it gets you wondering what this amazing new breakthrough is that is going to prevent those embarrassing laptop melt-downs and inadvertent griddle emulations.  The answer? The Spin Injection Hall Effect, or SIHE – a relatively recently discovered phenomenon that results in electrons with different “spin” in a semiconductor leading to a measurable magnetic field.

The paper that the Texas A&M University news item refers to is “Spin-injection Hall effect in a planar photovoltaic cell” in the journal Nature Physics.  It appears in the September edition of the journal.  It’s an interesting and scientifically sound paper.  It describes work where an experimental semiconductor device is used to show that the Spin Injection Hall Effect can in principle be used to encode information in the spin state of electrons, then “read” that information back.

It is research that could be useful to new ways of transmitting and storing information in the future.

But keeping laptops cool?  Hardly!  And certainly not imminently.

So what’s going on here?  How do we get from some pretty esoteric research on electron spin to preventing “laptop-burn?”

The most generous explanation is that, in one possible future, this science could underpin technologies that lead to lower energy microprocessors, and that this is what the researchers latched on to in an attempt to make their work relevant to a broad audience. But this is an incredibly huge leap.  It’s the scientific equivalent of playing the lottery – speculation in the extreme.  There’s a small chance that the science might lead, through a long chain of events, to microprocessors 12 – 50 years down the line that are faster and more efficient.  But making your MacBook Pro run cooler?  Give me a break!

Another explanation is that Texas A&M wanted to sex the research up – raising their profile at the expense of informed science reporting.

Or maybe someone just got hold of the wrong end of the stick – or the wrong stick entirely.

I’m not sure which of these is closer to the truth.  But what is clear is that this type of misrepresentation of the science at source is not uncommon, and it is highly damaging to understanding of and engagement in science within society.

In this case, the assumptions and speculations behind the laptop claims weren’t clarified, and little attempt was made to distinguish between the science and the fantasies it inspired.  As a result, media outlets that picked up on the story simply propagated the misinformation – including Science Daily.  And as many readers would not have access to the original paper, they would not have the means to test the claims being made.

If research institutions misrepresent the science they are involved in, what hope is there for informed science coverage in the media?  And more importantly, how on earth are people to get an informed sense of emerging science and technology, and engage in a meaningful dialogue on its development and implementation?

I’m all for imagining where different avenues of research might lead.  But fantasizing about future applications as if they are just around the corner is naive at best, and just plain cynical at worst.  And the sad thing is, it ends up further disengaging people from the process of science and technology innovation – robbing them of the ability to participate effectively in a science and technology-driven society.

Effective science coverage in the media is under threat, and there many factors at play here.  But surely this makes it even more important that scientists and research institutions don’t simply add to the problem.  I’m probably being a little unfair picking on Texas A&M here – they aren’t the only ones feeding the media with questionable material.  But it seems that if the science community is serious about good science reporting, it needs to get its own house in order before pointing too many fingers at others.

After all, journalists and others reporting on science and technology are only as good as their sources.  Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how hot or cold the laptop is running!

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/10/30/do-scientists-encourage-misleading-media-coverage/feed/ 32 http://2020science.org/2009/10/23/risk-innovation-you-what-desparately-seeking-advice/ http://2020science.org/2009/10/23/risk-innovation-you-what-desparately-seeking-advice/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:07:39 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=2348

Here’s something I’ve been chewing over for the past few weeks:  How do you capture succinctly the idea of developing innovative new approaches to identifying, assessing, managing and otherwise dealing with risks to human health?

What I’ve ended up with is “Risk Innovation” – but I’m not convinced it works.

So I thought I would see if anyone else had any other bright ideas!

This is the challenge in a nut shell:

When dealing with the possibility of substances harming people, there are well-established science-based approaches to identifying and quantifying the risks, backed up by a standard set of approaches to dealing with them (with regulation typically rising to the top of the pile).  But these aren’t always effective – and as technologies become more complex, development life cycles become faster and societal hierarchies shift, there’s going to be an increasing need to find new ways to deal with possible health impacts arising from substances.

In fact, the life cycle of new technologies is becoming so short that it won’t be long before they are superseded long before conventional approaches to assessing and managing risks have kicked in.

In other words, technology innovation has to be accompanied by innovations in how we handle risks, if things are going to get better rather than worse for us in the future.

This is a young area of research that is developing rapidly.  It’s stimulating, exciting and, above all, crucial to the success of emerging technologies (as well as dealing with new problems emerging from previous technologies).

But it doesn’t have a convenient “handle.”

“Innovation in risk identification, assessment, management and governance” gets to the nub of the idea.  But it is also on the soporific side of engaging.  Not to beat about the bush, it’s just not sexy!  The same goes for various other permutations that try to capture accurately the idea of developing new approaches to handling risk.

So what I’ve ended up with is “Risk Innovation.”

My problem though is that, while the phrase is catchy, it’s wide open to interpretation.  It could mean anything from innovative approaches to dealing with risk, to innovative ways of increasing risk – not something most self-respecting health professionals would want to be associated with!!

But what’s the alternative?  Or am I being over-sensitive here?

Any thoughts here (please use the comments area below) would be more than welcome.

Thanks!

Part 8 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21^st century

Much to my embarrassment, I’ve just realized that it was over four months ago that I wrote the previous blog in this series – a series that was supposed to evolve over just a few weeks!  Most inconveniently, other priorities ended up interfering with my well-laid plans and I found myself distracted from completing the series, just three posts before its conclusion.

The good news though is that this gives me an excuse to provide a lightning summary of the story so far, which goes something like this:

• We stand at a nexus of unimaginable technological potential, and unprecedented global challenges.  How we develop and use science and technology over the coming decades will determine the quality (and possibly even the quantity) of life for coming generations.
• Three factors in particular are influencing the challenges we face, and the tools we have at our disposal to meet them.  These are the rate at which knowledge and ideas are propagating and influencing people, the increasingly strong links between human actions and environmental re-actions, and the ability of scientists, technologists and engineers to bend the material world to their every whim; from atoms and molecules to global weather systems.  These are my three “C’s” – communication, coupling and control.
• The coupling between human actions and environmental re-actions is cumulative, non-linear, and rapidly increasing in importance.  Which means that we are now facing global challenges that are more complex and further reaching than any previous generation has had to deal with.
• Rapid changes in how we communicate with each other are rewriting the rules on how society operates, from the global scale to the local level.
• High-impact advanced in science and technology are being driven increasingly by advances in control over materials at the scale of atoms and molecules.  Atom-level control over everything from DNA to advanced materials to smart drugs is poised to vastly extend our technological reach as a species.
• Separately, these three factors confront us with new challenges and new opportunities.  Together, they demand a new way of thinking about science and technology if we’re going to ride the wave of the future, rather than being engulfed by it.

The obvious question at this point – and the subject of this blog – is “how effective are current approaches to developing and using science and technology, and what (if anything) needs to change if we are to adapt and thrive as a species?”  In other words, how as a society can we make decisions that will ensure we have the necessary scientific understanding and technological know-how to overcome emerging challenges and realize the opportunities facing us, without creating more problems than we solve?

And that means we need to talk about science and technology policy.

Effective science and technology policy depends on a robust a framework for decision-making that helps ensure an appropriate level of investment in science and technology, and a good return on that investment.  Every developed country/economy has well-established approaches to science and technology policy—whether formally expressed, or simply in the form of a prevalent set of assumptions or beliefs amongst policy makers.  And these approaches have worked okay in the main over the past fifty years or so.

But are they flexible enough to weather the looming challenges of the 21^st century?

In the United States, approaches to science and technology policy still reflect largely the thinking of Vannevar Bush.  In 1945, Bush presented President Truman with a vision of science in Science, The Endless Frontier that started with basic research, and ended with social and economic growth.  While thinking has evolved since then, many policy makers are still strongly influenced by his ideas.

In crude terms, Bush’s concept was that pure research (directed predominantly by scientists) leads to applied research, which in turn leads to technological innovation.  This in turn stimulates economic growth, which leads to more jobs, more money, and a better quality of life for citizens.

This top-down, linear model has worked well over the years in the U.S. – scientists have been funded reasonably well by the Federal Government, and have been given considerable latitude in what they do.  And in the U.S. at least, this investment seems to have resulted in considerable technology innovation and wealth generation.

But I’m not sure the same approach has got what it takes to address the very different challenges of the 21^st century.

Although current approaches to science and technology policy tend to be more sophisticated than Bush’s model, there is still a tendency to take a top-down linear approach.  Typically under this model, goals for science and technology investment are crafted, funding levels decided, and mechanisms and routes by which those funds will be allocated are identified within government.  It is then assumed that this up-front decision-making will lead to innovation, which will lead to jobs, wealth and, at the end of the day, a better quality of life for citizens.

The degree to which policy makers adhere to or diverge from this (admittedly simplistic) overview depends on where you are in the world.  But this general approach still plays a large role in determining the direction of and funding for science and technology policy in many countries.

Yet this very hierarchical approach to decision-making may not have what it takes to ensure scientific and technological success over the coming years.

First up, it assumes that heavy investment in basic research will naturally lead to technology innovation.  This over-simplistic assumption has been questioned repeatedly over the past decades, perhaps most notably by Donald E. Stokes in his book Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation – it’s an assumption that is likely to be further challenged as the interplay between science, technology and society becomes increasingly complex and dynamic.

Then it assumes that up-front investment in science and technology will naturally lead to an improved quality of life through wealth creation.  Yet the values on which the model is based are beginning to look a little simplistic—dated even—in today’s diverse and interconnected world.

And finally, it supports a top-down approach to science and technology policy that encourages policy lock-in.  This occurs when there are few mechanisms to rethink policy decisions that don’t work—a very precarious position to be in where the policy process potentially lags a long way behind technological progress.

In other words, the widely used linear model of science policy could well fall flat in a world where communication, coupling and control demand responsive and adaptive approaches to guiding and utilizing science and technology.

So what’s the alternative?

A complete rethink of science and technology policy frameworks is way beyond the scope of this blog.  But two issues stand out as being at the top of the rethink-list: the need for a less hierarchical policy framework, and the need for more effective feedback mechanisms.

Starting from the bottom, most people would agree that the end goal of investing in science and technology is improved quality of life.  But what this means and the route to achieving it will vary, depending on a number of factors.  The concept that technology innovation and wealth generation will automatically lead to an improved quality of life is one perspective—but it isn’t the only one.  As social and political boundaries are redrawn through new ways of communicating and technology-driven possibilities advance at an increasing rate, I suspect this perspective will begin to look a little naïve.  An alternative approach is to have multiple goals for the science and technology endeavor—recognizing that wealth, jobs, quality of life etc. are important and intertwined, but not necessarily linearly connected.  In other words, recognizing that quality of life may depend on more than making money!

Similarly, I suspect there will need to be a rethink of the relationship between setting top-level goals for science and technology policy and the means of achieving those goals.  Rather than a top-level steer on science and technology policy, it is going to become increasingly important to flatten the process of crafting policies that determine the direction research and development is pointed in, how much is invested in it, and how the money is spent.

But perhaps most importantly, there will need to be increased feedback between what comes out of science and technology policy, and what goes in.

In any complex and dynamic system, feedback is the key to ensuring stability and adaptability.  The Bush-type hierarchical model of science and technology policy has relatively little in the way of feedback.  But this will need to change if policies are to lead to scientific research and technological innovation that achieve what they set out to.  Rapid advances in communication, coupling and control are pushing us a long way out of equilibrium—without effective feedback loops, the consequences could be catastrophic.

A robust science and technology policy framework will depend on many and varied feedback mechanisms.  But amongst these, the ability to review inputs against outputs, and the participation of people and organizations affected by policy decisions, will be essential.

From this perspective, a revised science